No Stupid Questions

As people dive deeper into a hobby they have very particular desires. That means two things: (1) specialty parts with very low sales volumes, and (2) people are willing to pay extra to get exactly what they want. If I just want two wheels and a set of pedals and don't really care about the details then I can grab any $200 bike from a department store. But if I want, say, a very particular drivetrain, carbon fiber parts to shave weight, maybe a specific suspension design, mounting points for niche accessories, etc., then I'm shopping for very specific items from boutique brands. That's why a very small number of hardcore riders do crazy stuff like pay over $4k for a set of wheels.

You'll see the same thing in other hobbies, too. I can't imagine what some people spend on their gaming PCs.

Low key loving it that people here automatically assume that a bike would mean you would go on trails and off road while here in the Netherlands we still are riding that old riggidy hunk of metal (a Omafiets) we got handed down form our sister 15 years ago. (Who also got it as a hand me down)

There are nice bikes here with carbon fiber belts instead of metal chains but those get quickly stolen or used so much they wear down away in a few years because the bikes get beaten to bits by the weather and usage.

Making a bike lightweight is not so hard. Making a bike lightweight and durable is. Top end bikes use high end materials and are engineered to very high standards. But if you just want to get from A Too B, a cheap bike will do just fine.

We should really stop propagating this narrative that all bikes are expensive. Insanely sophisticated race bikes or gravel bikes that you could throw off a cliff without your derailleur getting misaligned are very expensive. A very good, reliable, and perfectly usable bike for the average person cost <$500. Even that is a lot for some people but it's a LONG way off from the $3k-20k bikes people THINK they need it worse people ASSUME is what all bikes cost. The best selling models of almost every major manufacturer are their lowest and middle tier entry level bikes, which is a slight step up from what you can buy at a Walmart or target. Those Walmart and Target bikes btw, will serve the vast majority of people just fine.

For some more extreme riders, they need bikes that are designed way stronger than any average bike. Imagine jumping a 50 foot ramp on a common bicycle, you'll straight up break the frame in half.

I had met a retired rider from https://m.pinkbike.com/ and had a chance to ride his ~$8000 bicycle, that thing was built like a friggin' tank with some of the most advanced mechanical features I've ever seen, including adjustable hydraulic shocks.

As far as lightweight, that bike was anything but lightweight, it was rather heavy actually, but when frame and fork strength is way more important, that's just a necessary tradeoff for safety in extreme riding.

The corrrect answer is massive profiteering off of suckers.

There’s some engineering expense, that makes real bikes that last years and perform reliably, which makes it more expensive than a Walmart bike, but after that it’s rip off city.

Easiest measure to illustrate this, is the price of motorcycles. You can drop £10k on road bike or mountain bike, and still not really get top of the range. Look up what kind of motorcycle you can get for that money and then make a value judgement .

Something I haven't seen mentioned in these threads is economies of scale. Most cars are kind of engineering and machining marvels especially for their price, with a huge amount of their manufacturing being automated to a very high level. Fancy bikes probably do not have the production volume to justify that kind of automation. Their price represents their actual production being less efficient, not being able to amortize the R&D costs over as many units, and general luxury premium.

For a lot of people the point of a hobby seems to be as an outlet for their unhealthy relationship with money and purchasing, and markets find ways to take advantage of that.

You can buy good used bikes for cheap though, and maintain them cheaply also, so it isn't a problem for people who are not stupidly rich or insane.

What make bikes so expensive?

R.: The willing of people to buy them.

Mountain bikes have to be lightweight and strong, and production volume is low. Suspension design takes R&D, and adds moving parts. Start pricing components and you hit $5000 easy for a full-suspension bike. For hardtails, you are making a lot of compromises at $1500, but $2500 gets you a nice bike.

For road/gravel bikes, once you get over $2000, you are paying a lot of money for tiny weight savings, negligible aerodynamic improvements, and electronic gizmos.

For either mountain or road, if you want a custom/hand-made frame and parts made in the developed world paying living wages, you are going to spend a lot more. Taiwan makes a lot of great frames, but if you want a frame made buy a dude in Denver who names all his bikes after craft beers, add several grand.

For city/commuter bikes, you can get something perfectly good for under $1000, but if you can swing $2000, get a Brompton.

While what a lot of people said is true, with R&D costs, economy of scale, and such, a lot of it is profit too. They make bank on those high end bikes. Then they spend a chunk of that bank to sponsor riders, races, and advertising, so that they can continue making bank. What really gets my goat is bike shops around here charging $198 an hour for super basic mechanics. Anyone with any sort of mechanical aptitude can work on bicycles. It's not rocket science.

Same way as high-end sports cars can cost hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Regular commuters are cheap, you can get perfectly good 2nd hand bike for a pocket money, but a high-end enduro bike with state-of-art parts and exotic materials can cost you over 10k.

Cycling is the new golf. There are lots of 50 year old dentists with disposable income out there who think electionic shifting and aero carbon wheels will enable them to drop their "buddies" on their Saturday group ride.

I can only on road bikes as that’s what I ride. But it seems like the biggest factor that drives up prices is a combination of weight and aerodynamics.

For just regular people, If you know where to look you can get a high end bike that was unfinished at the factory and didn’t get painted/stickered/branded and pay a fraction of the price. A lot of time the branding is what really drives up prices.

But in the very high end it’s really all about weight and aero. Professional racers will pay a hefty premium to knock a few grams off of their bikes total weight, or to get parts that are more aerodynamic and thus give you better power transfer between your bike and the road.

And then the lighter you want to get, you start getting diminished returns, and exponentially higher prices. Like if you compare a 3 pound saddle to a 1 pound saddle it might be a little bit more expensive. But then if you have a 150 gram saddle and want to get a 100 gram saddle that might be 20x the price.

Lighter parts also have to sustain the same amount of forces (and sometimes much much more) as their heavy duty steel counterparts so finding things that can undergo this amount of stress and not break plays into it as well.

And this doesn’t even go into materials. The big new thing is titanium bikes which are ridiculously expensive but will last several lifetimes if taken care of. And then carbon fiber is difficult to make and even more difficult to make well. Much lighter and than other materials but really only flexes in one direction and can be really fragile if under the wrong type of stress.

Fortnine did a great video on this

https://youtu.be/BS9ugdl1FZc?si=JeSBpYtkluCE0rxg

The answer is economy of scale, the collapse of the American manufacturing industry, bloated budgets, especially brand/marketing budgets, and the prices set by OEM manufacturers who themselves have bloated budgets. A lot of these brands arent actually manufacturers but middlemen for manufacturers. They do design, service, marketing and maybe assembly. But manufacturing is primarily done overseas. If it's manufactured domestically the labor and material costs are commensurate. Maybe the frame is made domestically, maybe not.

A perfectly decent bicycle is less than $100 in China.

Tldr: Why does anything cost money? Because someone will pay that amount to purchase it.