Why are bicycles so expensive?

MrSalmon – Member

{they charge more because they know We are stupid enough to fall for their marketing and lust for debt … the sooner we stop buying at their (OBVIOUSLY SILLY PRICES) the sooner they will drop, i mean £5000 for a bluddy pushbike PERRRLEASE}

“Crikey, is that how much a bike costs these days? That IS expensive”.

MrSalmon, my mate has just paid £7400 for a colnago c59 i kid you not!
i just dont see it myself, things have gone Waaaay out of propotion IMO

c. don’t invest in/believe in customer service and so can cut costs there.

I’d actually expect a replacement faster from On-One than a big company to be honest. Were it someone like Specialized the replacement would also be a completely random colour. Don’t like it? Get stuffed!

Kashima coating, that one really cracks me up

Toasty – Member
I’d actually expect a replacement faster from On-One than a big company to be honest. Were it someone like Specialized the replacement would also be a completely random colour. Don’t like it? Get stuffed!

Any dealings I’ve had with Specialized have been absolutely 1st class. I’ve seen lots of other posts backing this up.

On One?? A joke.

Anyway – back on topic.

When I was working in a bike shop a couple of years back, we took a delivery of some Cube hardtails, including the Analog. IIRC, RRP was £599. Frankly, I was stunned at what good value it was for that amount of money and if that’s all I had to spend on a bike, I’m sure it would do 90% of what I need/want.

R&D and material design in top end bikes

From what I see in magazines a lot of ‘top end’ bikes (e.g. Whyte) are designed by one bloke with a CAD package, and maybe a basic FE package…. one step up from guy in a shed – hardly top end engineering.

Motorcycle stanchions will be chromed steel, MTB alloy with fancy coatings. Motorcycle suspension less adjustable and less linkages.

Hum not really no. But then I shouldn’t be surprised you own a BSA, for a modern motorcycle the design is as complex as for mtb and they use fancy coating too. But I concur if you want the equivalent of a 6k€ bike, aka a ready to race with no compromise machine, you’ll have to spend an awfull lot more than 10k€ for a motorbike.

Ewan – Member
R&D and material design in top end bikes
From what I see in magazines a lot of ‘top end’ bikes (e.g. Whyte) are designed by one bloke with a CAD package, and maybe a basic FE package…. one step up from guy in a shed – hardly top end engineering.

That’s just the frame. Think of the intricacy of a set of Shimano STIs, the milling in a Hope Stem or the ramping on a set of chainrings. There’s lots of detail stuff that we take for granted.

juan – Member
if you want the equivalent of a 6k€ bike, aka a ready to race with no compromise machine, you’ll have to spend an awfull lot more than 10k€ for a motorbike.

In road bikes, we’re already at the point where an amateur can have a lighter/more advanced machine than a Pro due to minimum weight limits. A top-end Specialized S-Works Epic at £7k won’t be too far removed from what the Pros are racing.

if you want the equivalent of a 6k€ bike, aka a ready to race with no compromise machine, you’ll have to spend an awfull lot more than 10k€ for a motorbike.

+1

scary 😉

Although bikes are expensive it’s more cost effective to buy a complete bike than replace the parts at RRP

A guy I work with spent £350 on a golf stick.
No moving parts, though a smidge of CF and probably titanium (its one of those drivers that go ping).
I did say “you could buy a bike for that!”

buy what you can afford and enjoy riding it, everthing here (uk)seems expensive, went to buy some new jeans the other day levi’s £95 I paid £30 for my last pair, needless to say I still look like a tramp

They don’t make them like they used to.
Thankfully bicycles buck the trend.
How much is that stink bike going to cost in fuel and maintenance? Road fund licence etc etc.
Do you hammer it every time you get out on it? I mean like properly go nuts!
If you do hammer it how long till you hit something like a tree or lorry?
How much do tyres cost and how long do they last?
Insurance?

Now think about your bicycle. Mine gets caned on a regular basis and has cost me me about £100 every year for the last 6/7 years on tyres, cables, fork service etc.
Doesn’t need fuel or oil.
No insurance.
Fix it in my back yard.

Great value I think.

A top-end Specialized S-Works Epic at £7k

is a good example –

(not spesh here, but a generalisation that’s not far off) Frames are made somewhere, bikes are often assembled by a factory somewhere else, then sold to the brand/designer, then sold to a distribution company (or national subsiduary of the big brand that has similar overheads), then a retailer, then to a customer. There’s a few layers of margin there. Go more direct and you can reduce RRPs. If Giant or Merida sold online factory direct worldwide, they could offer bike prices would put some companies out of business very quickly. Good luck getting a warranty issue sorted fast or selling to a customer without home mechanic skills though – that’s where retailers and distributors come in. If you buy a big brand you usually get good design and after-sales as well as retailer support, supporting that has a cost.
If you can buy good design direct from a small brand and build up your own bikes you can save money and get good support too, but not everyone can / wants to do that.

The earlier Decathlon vs Orange example – just look at those 2 bikes. One looks like a well laid-out bike from a small company full of riders, the other looks like a generic / average MTB from a company that buys and sells huge amounts of stuff in mass markets. The time taken to get a bike riding well and specced with good parts has to be recouped – with some pre-planning, you could spec a bike in a 1 hr meeting in a trade show booth if you’re simply a box-ticker looking at margins alone, or you can sample it, ride it and test it, repeat until happy it’s a good’un, then market it etc. One costs more than the other )

Some bikes are hideously expensive whilst others are superb value. Cube Carbon 29er at my LBS is a lovely bike for £1349.
The object of my lust at the mo though is a Santa Cruz Tallboy LTc at £2700 frame and shock only. Adding Fox 34’s to the front brings it up to around £3600.
BUT, to me it’s still good value due to the smiles per mile.

I’ve been agonising about ordering said frame for a couple of weeks now, but I flicked through a copy of Motorbooat and Yachting Mag today which put things in perspective. 🙂

Many, many boats for sale at £200,000+ which do 0.5 – 3 mpg cruising 😯 Most will probably only get used a few weekends a year realistically too.

A top-end Specialized S-Works Epic at £7k won’t be too far removed from what the Pros are racing.

Yes but even a panigiale at 20000€ is nowhere as near of what the pros are riding.
IIRC the Desmodici was around the 50000 mark, and even though it’s wasn’t Stoner’s bike.

Njee stop that

rootes – I like your point, but I think that there is another layer of complexity. I realize that this is not a perfect comparison, but I don’t have the next 6 months free to do detailed research:

Nissan have 22 different “model lines” (their term) on their main webpage for the US.

Giant[/url] lists 72 different models (the underlined links) on their webpage.

Worldwide, there are what, maybe 100-150 brands of cars, including those like Tata (India) and Cherry (China) that aren’t available in the US/UK markets? How many thousand brands of bikes? Giant alone has over 3x the models that Nissan does, so the bike market is much, much, more fragmented leading to higher development, distribution, and marketing costs, and less economy of scale.

I don’t buy the argument that high end mountain bikes equate to high end motorbikes. Sure mountain bikes have to be lighter and have less ‘energy sapping’ components. This is valid. But high end mountain bike components crap out very quickly in my experience. I’ve replaced almost every part of my 3 year old trail bike, many of them more than once. Yesterday I rode my 17 year old dirt bike, which has done in excess of 250,000 off road miles. Other than cables, tyres, spark plugs, brake pads and filters it it completely original. It works every day in every way. It doesn’t get washed, greased, tweaked at all. It gets put away wet and covered in crap.
Same bearings throughout as came out of the factory. Sure, it weighs 110kg. But it also does 100mph over very rough ground, handles 3 metre drops to flat regularly, wades mud and rivers and gets crashed several times a year, hard. I bet the forces it regularly experiences are more than 10x those experienced by my trail bike, and it doesn’t weigh 10 times as much.
And the f*cking hydrolic brakes have NEVER been bled in 17 years and still work!
Mountain bikes are definitely better than they were, but they are not more durable, and not durable enough to warrant the price.

Wait you’ve ridden 15,000 miles off road every year for 17 years?

I was buying was £99 but the cost price to John Lewis was £33! I saw that and have to admit to being tempted to walk out the shop and not buy it.

That’s a perfectly normal markup in retail.

But as my Brothers shop proved, it’s not greed, as it needed to cover the costs of running a shop.

His shop was pretty small, and the Rent alone was £35,000 / year.

That’s before all the other costs, bills, rates, staff, insurance etc etc etc.

i can totaly believe that people will stand up for an industry and country that is Blatantly ripping them off day by day BUT i ask one thing, would any of you be happier if bike pricing and taxation were lowered to the benefit of the masses (yea you lot) so you (and many others) could afford to play in this Ever increasingly Unaffordable hobby/pastime/way of life

Wait you’ve ridden 15,000 miles off road every year for 17 years?

+1 on doubting that, >40 miles off road every single day for 17 years?

I bet the forces it regularly experiences are more than 10x those experienced by my trail bike, and it doesn’t weigh 10 times as much.

At 110kg it pretty well does. Strength increases aren’t linear with weight either. Take a 65g handlebar. It’ll take a certain force. Use twice as much of the same material and it’ll take more than twice the force. Repeat across the whole bike.

Sure you could make bikes indestructible, but the weight penalties would be ridiculous!

That’s a perfectly normal markup in retail.

But as my Brothers shop proved, it’s not greed, as it needed to cover the costs of running a shop.

Not in bikes, find me any bike at all with that sort of markup. So bikes are clearly better value than watches and ‘normal’ retail products!

I was buying was £99 but the cost price to John Lewis was £33!

Selling price is £99 inc VAT, so that’s actually £82.50+VAT.

HMRC get £16.50 for the pleasure of taking money off you that you’ve already paid 25% tax on.
Shop get £49.50 for stocking and selling it.

That’s a 60% margin or 150% markup.

http://www.calculatenow.biz/business/markup.html

echoing Brant, shop also has to pay staff wages and pensions, heating and lighting, rent, rates, advertising, insurance, etc etc so they are not exactly making a fortune from the £99 retail price.

Can someone please point me to the bike brands I could get at that sort of markup? I fancy opening a shop.

rootes1 – Member
just for interest according to the bible of definitive facts (wiki) re scale of output

in 2002 Giant made just under 5m bikes in one year.. (imagine it is more now?)

Nissan in 2010 made just over 4m vehicles.

The relevant question is not how many bikes/cars either manufacturer made. Rather what % of Giant’s production was high end high performance bikes and what was BSOs. Similarly how many performance cars did nissan make? Sure you can buy a Nissan micra for **** all but how much does a GTR cost comparatively? And what percentage of the micra’s parts are so homogenous that they’re actually used on 10/15/20+million cars per annum?

Hi Frank,

That is why i suggested a look at the average retail cost per unit..

i.e average price of a Nissan and average price of a giant then also look at the how that average compares to the min and max per unit retail prices for each manufacturer.

as a completely off topic aside I still struggle to understand how the Nissan Qashqai became the 5th best selling car in the UK at one point…

Si

rootes – I like your point, but I think that there is another layer of complexity. I realize that this is not a perfect comparison, but I don’t have the next 6 months free to do detailed research:

Nissan have 22 different “model lines” (their term) on their main webpage for the US.

Giant lists 72 different models (the underlined links) on their webpage.

Worldwide, there are what, maybe 100-150 brands of cars, including those like Tata (India) and Cherry (China) that aren’t available in the US/UK markets? How many thousand brands of bikes? Giant alone has over 3x the models that Nissan does, so the bike market is much, much, more fragmented leading to higher development, distribution, and marketing costs, and less economy of scale.

yes good points, wonder also how the fact that there is more interchangeability of parts between bike manufacturers (they often use the same components etc as each other due to ‘standards’) as opposed to car industry with more brand specific parts (though increasing amount of sharing going on)

You’ll find that the interchangeability in the car industry is more important than in the bike industry

I’m pretty sure the car industry works on considerably tighter margins than the watch or bike industry.
Pretty good “cash margins” but percentage wise quite low.

Yes but that does make sense. The higher the price the lower the margin. You typical B&Q is probably having a margin around 400% on nuts and bolts.

Your “superbike” costing £10,000 is more like a boardman bike cost £1000

TJ…. you what? What a load of **** bollocks…. do you ride motorbikes at all?

That will buy you a road going Triumph 600RR, a little more will even buy a superstock version and a seasons race entries. Two grand more than that will buy you a brand new BMW S1000RR and you can get full on 1000cc race superstock bikes for about 17k.

If you want to race though, cycling (even dh) is cheaper as you don’t tend to high side and send 10-20k’s worth of motorbike cartwheeling down the track.

Hum not really no. But then I shouldn’t be surprised you own a BSA, for a modern motorcycle the design is as complex as for mtb and they use fancy coating too. But I concur if you want the equivalent of a 6k€ bike, aka a ready to race with no compromise machine, you’ll have to spend an awfull lot more than 10k€ for a motorbike.

Not that much more than 10k£, a brand new S1000RR has adjustable compression settings and ti-nitride plated fork stanchions. For 200 quid you can even have your forks coated in diamond like carbon.

I’ve seen mountain bikes costing 7k £. Total lunacy.

If you think the machine you’ve quoted are race ready well, you’re a bit deluded.
How much do you think the ducati 1098 factory superbike costs?
More than 20 grand easy.

That’s superbike level though isn’t it. Superstock bikes are race ready and much much cheaper.

The costs of superbike class racebikes are not really related to suspension at all, but things like electronics, ceramic disk brake rotors, low life performance engine parts such as pistons and the constant quest to find an extra millisecond a lap.

These uber-expensive superbikes will still then only go a couple of seconds a lap faster than a superstock bike.

bwaarp – Member
That’s superbike level though isn’t it. Superstock bikes are race ready and much much cheaper.

And a Boardman is a lot cheaper than an S-Works Epic. What’s your point?

And a Boardman is a lot cheaper than an S-Works Epic. What’s your point?

That an S-works epic clearly isn’t in the **** realms of Moto GP technology and that much better than a 3k bike compared to how vastly different Moto GP bikes are when compared to bog standard track bikes.

And a Boardman is a lot cheaper than an S-Works Epic. What’s your point?

This.

As has been said, £7k bikes are basically World Cup level bikes, best of the best, so to compare to a motorbike that merely ‘can’ be raced, is daft.

That an S-works epic clearly isn’t in the **** realms of Moto GP technology.

Missing the point though aren’t you. You’ve given an example of a motorbike that is ‘race ready’ – as is a Boardman at £1000. Makes the motorbike pretty expensive.

Cube that got mentioned before are a good example, smaller company than Giant/Spesh/Trek/GT etc, yet miles better value. How can they do:

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=72842

For the price of a Giant XTC with Deore and Recons? The big brands just don’t seem to be worth the sum of their parts anymore, genuinely don’t quite get it.

As has been said, £7k bikes are basically World Cup level bikes, best of the best, so to compare to a motorbike that merely ‘can’ be raced, is daft.

Really, did Speccy have legions of engineers that needed to develop an engine to operate at 18,000rpm?

The fast that WSB guys can then take that stock engine and actually have to detune it to make it usable on the track because of an over agressive power delivery is telling you something.

If a bike is in the same weight category and same spec yet one costs 3 times as much, it’s a rip off.