Have you been priced out of biking?

Orbea had a rear EXO+ Rekon for their bikes that was exclusive to them IIRC (that’s an upgrade, not a downgrade). Plenty of examples in the past of OEM tyres using a cheaper layup and compound than their aftermarket namesakes. Yes, the labelling would be slightly different, but nothing your average customer would pick up on.

How date you all blame Brexit for higher prices!!!
I’ll have you know that Brexit is going to bring down costs everywhere, let us be in control again and more importantly Brexit is going to save the NHS and let us have our British Blue Passports back (made in France).

On a more serious note, I do think that a lot of people are being priced out of higher end new bikes, but (if we ignore the MTB marketing powers) we can see that a lot of the lower spec group sets, suspension, etc are actually really good now (not you SRAM SX, never you). Most people don’t need H/L speed rebound and compression adjustments, the latest dampers or shiny carbon parts/bikes that (might) save us a little bit of weight here and there. We’d like to think they’d make us faster and better and let us buy some more speed.

I do think there are some brands making decent entry level bikes at reasonable prices, but not all of them and there’s definitely some min/maxing going on with the guys who spec them.

Another reason that people might prefer to buy a complete bike even though there isn’t any real cost saving is because they need finance to buy their bike as not everyone has several grand sitting around to blow on a new shiny toy (speaking from experience her guys) and getting finance (or Bike to Work) is easier/possible on a complete bike compared to trying to get it on every component that you need to build one (which would also stop you shopping around for bargains).

Personally I have always been able to easily afford a bike when spread over 2 – 3 years of small payments (due to having an decent salary) but never had £2K+ in one go.

I do think that a lot of people are being priced out of higher end new bikes

Fairer to say that manufacturers are pricing their higher end bikes out of reach. Because as above the higher end has gone through the roof. Because they realised that as cycling became fashionable amongst people with money, they could keep adding models and people would keep coming forward to buy them. Those people are funding R&D and manufacturing that trickles down to more normal stuff.

How different does the labelling have to be? Would a white brand logo (OEM) vs yellow (AM) be enough?

A good example of a misconception about OE – tyres and what maxxis does – White is (for now) OE only, but yellow isn’t aftermarket only. Maxxis offer white to keep pedantic colour matching bike speccers at companies making bikes happy, not because thats what OEs get. As an OE you can choose the colour of the logo to suit you. We buy yellow so we can mix in aftermarket tyres that we don’t want hundreds of, but we could have white, or both.

My point being there’s no examples AFAIK of people labelling two products as the same, although as Kelvin says its possible to get confused if you don’t know the difference.

Satisfying little Maxxis tidbit there, thanks Ben.