Giant pull the pin on 26"…

… well, almost completely. DH and long travel FS only in 26″ flavour for them next year, and stepping away from 29″ too. Considering how much the UK mags and riders seemed to love the likes of the anthem and trance x 29ers, this seems interesting…

http://www.bikemag.com/gear/news-giant-goes-big-with-27-5/

Wow .. Didnt take em long to bin 29 inch clown wheeled bikes then .. Knew it was only a fad 😀
26ers are the future …. long live the 26er

Bikeradar article on the 2014 Giants implies most of the 29ers will continue to be offered for the time being, but that the LT stuff (Trance 29er?) may not be.

Hasn’t the full suspension fad died off yet 😆

I really don’t know why people include 29ers in the wheel size fight, it is suitably different to have no real threat from 27.5/26 so I am sure we will end up with 29er for XC (which it is awesome for) and probably 27.5 for everything else (only because people are suckers for new things and it is a bigger number so must be better).

The non cycling types who buy the most bikes will just get whatever they are told to in the shops / which colour they like the look of.

27.5 is just marketing and a new thing to sell stuff and impacts frame, fork, rim, tyre manufactures so they are all the big boys who are happy to do anything that will cause a wide scale “refresh” of kit.

I do like bigger wheels (I ride a 36″ uni offroad and moved to 29er for my XC bike so have nothing against 27.5 it is the same change as when I went from my 24×3 uni to a 26×2.4 one other than weight the overall speed was as near as damnit the same (on a uni you are 1:1 fixed gear so you are going to notice it far more than on a bike).

Anyway it gives everyone new battle lines to fight over lol

Big risk for Giant as most of their 29ers get good reviews, the 29er Anthem came runner up in ‘bike of the year’.

I think we have all been nicely conditioned now to accept 27.5. We all already know 26 and have had the 29 benefits drummed into us for the past 4 years so, when a bike company offers a bike with all of the benefits its hard to counter the argument.

There have been posts in the past on here (alot) that diss the 29er as just a marketing tool, i initially disagreed but im starting to wonder if the whole thing was planned, with 27.5 being the end result. 😐
conspiracy?

Damn, I haven’t even finished building up my anthem 26er yet….

29″ becomes niche again!

29″ were always sold as bikes for tall people. I’m 5’6 so why do I need a 29″? The future will be 650b for a while and back to 26″ saying cap in hand “we were wrong” and we all have to buy new tyres again.

They look more ‘right’ than the maestro Giants have done in a fair while if you ask me.

I saw a 29er with a baby seat on the back of it , so total mainstream now.

Shouldn’t the thread title be Giant drop the 29er ?

Hopefully all the rich folks will “upgrage” to 650b and sell their “old” stuff cheap to the likes of me. Happy days.

This actually pisses me off. Loved demoing both anthem and trance 29er and thought the latter was great. Then giant pull the plug on the trance 29er in one year despite good reviews. Where does this all end. I would have been even more pissed if i had bought the trance 29 ER this year!

To those saying that this is a risk for Giant, I assume they aren’t just dropping 29ers on a whim, rather that as good as the reviews have been maybe they haven’t sold particularly well. Kind of “yeah that’s a good bike, but I’ll buy something else which I fancy more”. Obviously I have no way to back any of this up, just offering a counter point 🙂

29″ were always sold as bikes for tall people. I’m 5’6 so why do I need a 29″?

At that height maybe you ought to be riding 24″?

Yep I knew this day would come, where’s all the suckers who believed in the hype? Haha.. 29ers are history thank the lord it was just a fad for rich folk who can’t ride for toffee. One down just the 650 to shift now aye 😆

So Giant aren’t pulling the pin on 26″ wheeled bikes then ?

Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Until the smaller one.

Stick with your kids wheels and come back when you’re half as fast as this.

Wow, I didn’t expect them to move this quickly, but in retrospect it should have been obvious since we saw that article where they had already developed the carbon 27.5 Advanced frames. Normally they do that for the 2nd year of release to make sure before committing to the expense of the carbon molds.

As a Trance 29er owner I hope Giant provide good support for a fair period. They had problems in recent years with frame failures, so it would be expensive to re-equip if I they could only offer me a 27.5 replacement.

I’m not sure if I’m pissed about the change. I had to buy when I had the money available, and I wanted to try 29er. The news on the wholesale push to 27.5 hadn’t quite broken yet. In retrospect my original plan for a 29er replacement for my 26er race susser might have proved sounder, but I actually disliked the Anthem 29er and I was unexpectedly blown away by the Trance 29er. I kept my old 26er anyway which basically just sees race duties because it’s lighter, but I love riding the Trance 29er which I think is particularly suited to our dry, gravelly, and rocky trails. As it happens my 26er frame only lasted a year or so in production before they upped the travel, and I’ve kept that running for 10 years so far, so short of frame failure I expect to run the 29er just as long presuming 29er fork, rim, and tyre spares remain available. I think they will since I’m sure the 29er advantages won’t be easily given up by XC and marathon racers.

Interesting times then as the battle lines may have been redrawn. Instead of which 2 sizes will remain barring the XC and DH race extremes, it appears that the industry wants just 27.5, pitting it against all existing owners of 26 and 29. A huge bet indeed, which will either succeed or fail in spectacular fashion. AFAIK the Giant 29ers pretty much sold out which probably helped them make the early switch to 27.5. I benefitted from a big discount on mine. I wonder how many will wait out the early adopter risk with 27.5 though, and therefore whether the bet the industry has made will pay off or result in a return to 26.

Given that Giant are the worlds largest bike company this is pretty significant I think. Others are bound to follow, but 29 and 26 will likely become less popular in the shops.

[quoteHaha.. 29ers are history thank the lord it was just a fad for rich folk who can’t ride for toffee. One down just the 650 to shift now aye [/quote]

i never found my 29er to be a skill compensator, in fact i found it harder to ride in most situations over my 26. I just love the ride of the 29er….

[quoteHaha.. 29ers are history thank the lord it was just a fad for rich folk who can’t ride for toffee. One down just the 650 to shift now aye [/quote]

i never found my 29er to be a skill compensator, in fact i found it harder to ride in most situations over my 26. I just love the ride of the 29er….

I think part of the reason they went this way was they were loosing lots of sales in Asia by moving away from 26ers mainly due to the average height of Asians compared to Caucasians being lower. Harder to fit smaller people to a 29er.

great post londonerinoz. Pretty much feel the same except for the fact that they ran out of T29ers just as I was about to push the button. The idea of buying a bike just as manufacturers pull the plug on it, does not fill me the desire to splash the cash at the moment. Perhaps it’s another year of riding the old faithful until things became a little clearer. Having said that the extra travel on the Trance 2014 looks nice!

Perhaps we have gone through the thesis, antithesis, synthesis cycle with wheels already? Although with Trek making more of a push into 29ers this year, perhaps not!

The lime green Norco in Evans (sorry, just buying inners!) also looks nice!

FWIW, I simply preferred the ride of the 29ers. Nothing to do with hype. Rode 6 bikes one day on exactly the same trails. 3 x 26 and 3 x 29 and the result was clear for ME and MY TYPE of riding. Need to see if the 650bs are the correct balance as Giant suggest now?

ahh bollocks to all of this, im going out on my roadbike 😉

This is just b/s. What new standard will arise next to take our money then suddenly be abandoned ! They must think we are bloody stupid !

What with giant and their fork,stem ,bar compatability im surprised they haven’t invented a wheel size only they can use.

They must think we are bloody stupid !

Well people are obviously buying them, so perhaps we are…?

I’m not though; i ride a 26″ singlespeed!

I can understand people buying them if they like the feel, personally I don’t, but for the companies to go on about how great they are and then a few years later tell us all their faults to try to sell us yet another wheel size is just beyond me . They are total w******!

At least the Trance looks like a normal bike now.

JCL – Member
Stick with your kids wheels and come back when you’re half as fast as this.

POSTED 10 HOURS AGO # REPORT-POST

SHOCK HORROR!!! Some circus loving 29er fan boy posts a vid up of some pro being paid to ride a big wheeled bike down a track fast Woohoo!!! 😆

There is no risk to Giant at all.

The local bike buying public here seem to gravitate to them despite demoing and preferring other bikes for simple reasons (logical or not)

Brand Loyalty – I liked my last one – kind of the I liked the Imprezza so reckon the Subaru Jimmy will be a great car for me
It’s just such a good deal – they hit a good price point, being one of the biggest they can do stuff cheap and make it look great value.
They are everywhere, they get good mag coverage, into lots of shops flood the floors with them. If you have 75% of your stock as Giant’s your going to try and shift them.

Interesting thread. Funny enough, a few weeks back in a wheel size thread, I’d said I was wondering why if 27.5 (650b) really is the best of both worlds why the talk is only of it killing off the 26er.

Subaru Jimmy

Wrong on both counts, You mean Suzuki Jimny.

I’m an a-hole. 😉

I’m afraid you’ve actually all got it wrong guys!

Does This Spell the End of 26-inch Wheels For Giant?

Pinkbike asked Giant USA’s Global Product Marketing Manager Andrew Juskaitis a few questions about the switch to 27.5-inch wheels:

Is Giant USA eliminating 29 and 26-inch wheels from its XC, Trail and AM models for 2104?

· No, not entirely for 2014. Reign X and Glory remain 26 inch for 2014 and Anthem X and Trance X will still be offered in 29-inch. But that story will change in the future….

So, there are no 29er XC racing bikes for 2014?

· Anthem X 29er, XtC Advanced 29er and XtC Composite 29er will still be offered.

Will Giant follow this path throughout its DH range next year?

· Can’t answer that question directly, but you can imagine that if we believe so strongly in 27.5 for the majority of our range in 2014, you can guess what might happen in our future…

Can we expect to see 29 and 26-inch wheels eventually disappear in Giant’s consumer-priced bikes in the near future?

· 26-inch for sure, but 29-inch will be dependent on market feedback. That said, if the market progresses the way we believe it will, 29-inch will be phased out in approximately two years….again, totally dependent on market feedback.

· 26-inch for sure, but 29-inch will be dependen on market feedback.

Since when has the industry ever listened to market feed back! This is why it’s back fired on them,
They got too greedy, nobody wants big daft wheels and nobody asked for 650b which is hardly any different to 26″ wheels! Amen brother.

Pussy.

Anyone know what Gary Fishers (the person not the brand name) view is on all this wheel malarkey? it’s all his fault.

Google reveals the truth…

The real truth is that 40 years ago, Martians left mountain bikes in Marin County as a gift to humankind and since then the 26-inch wheel has been the ‘standard’ mountain-bike wheel size. A few years ago, Jupiter sent down 29-inch mountain-bike wheels in an attempt to prevent a Martian takeover of Earth.

Road cyclists have been using the larger size wheel since Pluto was a planet, but with typical Plutonian black humor they made the tires really skinny and hard.

In Europe, where everything is much better but a lot more expensive, they call the big wheel off-road bikes 28ers just to piss us off. The little ones they call ‘VTTs’, which is short for ‘very tiny tires’.

Are 29ers better? Yes, in the same way that 10 bottles of beer are better than six bottles of beer. A 4-inch-thick log seems smaller to a 29-inch wheel than to a 26-inch wheel. For another analogy, ask your sister-wives or girlfriend or boyfriend or all three.

Interesting thread. Funny enough, a few weeks back in a wheel size thread, I’d said I was wondering why if 27.5 (650b) really is the best of both worlds why the talk is only of it killing off the 26er.

The problem with being the ‘best of both worlds’, as with all in-between standards, is that it’s also the ‘worst of both worlds’ (in this case, heavier and less wieldly than 26″ and rolls less well than 29″).

Despite what Giant are saying, I still think it’s going to be hard to shift 29″ from XC hardtails/short-travel FS. Trail bikes and LT FS, OTOH, are looking increasingly like they’re going to be 650b. There’s also the issue that the 29er market grew slowly and organically, whereas 650b seems to have all the hallmarks of a big, overnight marketing push, and as such I remain sceptical.

Anyone know why we can’t use ISO sizing (ie. 559/584/622)?