Bike Prices.

[ChroniC]

The following is not based on totally hard facts and figures////

I know this subject has been done to death as a simple argument. The usual, you could buy a car for that, etc, however can it be seriously explained or justified for todays bike prices.
I rode my brothers £800 rode bike recently and apart from the weight and slightly slicker gear changes, i didn't find much difference from a £100 racer from 30yrs ago.

So I thought to myself, maybe the technology is expensive, but aside from carbon fibre, and much more complex gear levers shapes, nothing has changed. Derailers are still almost exactly the same.
So to break a bikes price down (in the most average and simplest terms)

- Tyres- £5 worth of rubber, and maybe a couple of kgs of aluminium @around .50p a kg and the design and construction. You'd be hard press to think a tyre should cost more than £20 at a push. Even carbon fibre based ones with CF@$5 a lb would only cost £50

-Frame based on the same assumption of $5 for carbon fibre, that's around $100 for a full 8kg frame.

Chains and gears. - Nothing has changed much in the mechanics of gears and chains, the gear switching etc has gone smoother and tidier on the handle bars. Given that maybe the design and construction are fiddly, I suppose it could cost but not exception amounts.

All of this, imo amounts to a bike that should be costing £300 or thereabouts.
I can't be alone in thinking this and have tried to rationalise the cost, and feels maybe there is a lot of price fixing amongst the bike market after a boom in interest in cycling, or am i missing the cost in my analysis that are associated with construction of parts, and manufactoring?
Personally paying £800-£1000 for a bike is (imo) insanity.

I really want to hear a logical explaination for the huge rise in price.

 

[Berger]

A Ferrari is a lump of metal with seats and an engine the same way a Lada is.

You sit in it and it moves you from a to b but the Ferrari looks better and goes faster.

One costs 100 times the other.

 

[grudas]

A Ferrari is a lump of metal with seats and an engine the same way a Lada is.

You sit in it and it moves you from a to b but the Ferrari looks better and goes faster.

One costs 100 times the other.

ha

basically, a bike is just a part of the "cyclist" a better, lighter etc bike is not going to make you faster, better etc at anything unless you're a good rider already and when you're at that stage, slicker gears, better wheels, aero etc offer you those precious seconds which can be a difference between winning and not, between having a pr and not etc!

from what it soundss, you don't cycle or take it seriously so from your "quick" ride you will not be able to tell the difference whereas pro/advanced rides would be.

on that note, lots of money goes into research and so on, its not just labour and metal/rubber that takes to build a PROPER bike.

 

[Vonhelmet]

I rode my brothers £800 rode bike recently and apart from the weight and slightly slicker gear changes, i didn't find much difference from a £100 racer from 30yrs ago.

30 years? OK, that's quite a lot of time.

So I thought to myself, maybe the technology is expensive, but aside from carbon fibre, and much more complex gear levers shapes, nothing has changed. Derailers are still almost exactly the same.

Derailleurs are not the same as 30 years ago.

So to break a bikes price down (in the most average and simplest terms)

- Tyres- £5 worth of rubber, and maybe a couple of kgs of aluminium @around .50p a kg and the design and construction. You'd be hard press to think a tyre should cost more than £20 at a push. Even carbon fibre based ones with CF@$5 a lb would only cost £50

-Frame based on the same assumption of $5 for carbon fibre, that's around $100 for a full 8kg frame.

You can't measure something by the value of the raw materials Computer chips are glorified sand, and we've got deserts full of that, yet some processors cost as much as a decent bike.

Chains and gears. - Nothing has changed much in the mechanics of gears and chains, the gear switching etc has gone smoother and tidier on the handle bars. Given that maybe the design and construction are fiddly, I suppose it could cost but not exception amounts.

Indexed shifting, 11 speed vs. what maybe 5 speed 30 years ago, bushless chains, chains and chainrings/sprockets shaped to aid shifting, weight savings... But yeah, I suppose nothing has really changed

All of this, imo amounts to a bike that should be costing £300 or thereabouts.
I can't be alone in thinking this and have tried to rationalise the cost, and feels maybe there is a lot of price fixing amongst the bike market after a boom in interest in cycling, or am i missing the cost in my analysis that are associated with construction of parts, and manufactoring?
Personally paying £800-£1000 for a bike is (imo) insanity.

I really want to hear a logical explaination for the huge rise in price.

With the greatest respect that I can muster, you don't know what you're talking about. If I'm coming across as blunt, it's because it's twenty past one in the morning.

The following is not based on totally hard facts and figures////

I guess at least you were honest from the outset.

 

[PermaBanned]

£100 in 1985 would be £287.48, which is just about the low end of what you might expect to pay for an entry level road bike today.

It's the same as any product. You're paying for raw materials, R&D and labour costs. You can look at it at face value as just bunging a few tubes of metal together, but in reality materials science is an incredibly involved part of the design process, especially with carbon fibre. You could quite easily make the case that there's more development to be done in the performance bicycle industry than there is in the automotive industry. But even if you do want just the bottom end, it still involves skilled work in design, in welding, in assembly, and a large part in hand lacing wheels, which hasn't changed much in 100 years.

You're right though, quite possibly the biggest difference between a modern bike and a 30 year old bike is in the shifters. Downtube shifters are literally just a piece of metal attached to a hinge. You move the lever, the cable moves. STI shifters are an order of magnitude more mechanically advanced, you have to achieve the same thing in a very small space with even more functionality, and they're still a lot more expensive to manufacture.

 

[DaleTheWhale]

800-1000 is quite cheap compared to more pro bikes.

You can't expect them to take raw materials, create a bike after extensive research and design ideas and sell you it for the price of what the raw materials cost. Nothing works like that, including other modes of transport.

 

[mattyfez]

You could make that argument about any product really, people spend hundreds on hi tech fishing rods, just a stick and a bit of string.
PC's.. A second hand ten year old one will get you on Facebook and youtube.. Why spend 800 on a high end one?

Test ride a £100 bike from argos and an £800 bike from wiggle back to back so as not to rely on a 30 year old nostalgic memory and all will become clear!

 

[touch]

I really want to hear a logical explaination for the huge rise in price.

The logical explanation for the increase in cost is called Inflation.
The logical explanation for the sale price of an item being more than the cost of it's raw materials is Manufacturing cost

 

[xdcx]

You got the logical explanation on pricing of Rapha ****?

 

[Dunks]

Are you seriously saying that an items price should be based purely on the cost of just the raw materials alone?

 

[FrenchTart]

Who cares - I want some of those carbon fibre tyres the OP mentions

 

[Vonhelmet]

Are you seriously saying that an items price should be based purely on the cost of just the raw materials alone?

I'm going to buy myself 6Kg of aluminium and a chisel. Wish me luck!

 

[SDK^]

Wind Tunnels
Rider and event sponsorship
Advertising
R&D

The money to fund the above has to come from somewhere
Also, prices are set at what people are willing to pay, not the sum value of what the components are worth.

It's the same for any market. A life saving pill may only cost 0.3 pence to make but retails for thousands.

 

[ChroniC]

Who cares - I want some of those carbon fibre tyres the OP mentions

Well done on pointing out tyre vs wheel, well done.

 

[ChroniC]

I'm going to buy myself 6Kg of aluminium and a chisel. Wish me luck!

I think my point is the price between cost and production to sale is massively over inflated.
Yes technology has changed but with that in the last 30yrs so should have production technology, which should hand in hand keep the costs level with the past.
At cost of £100, are you justifying the price of £1000+ bikes to be totally production costs?

The logical explanation for the increase in cost is called Inflation.
The logical explanation for the sale price of an item being more than the cost of it's raw materials is Manufacturing cost

As someone pointed out, inflation can only account for a rise in a few hundred max.

 

[ChroniC]

Derailleurs are not the same as 30 years ago.

It's hardly a stagerring leap in technology!!

You can't measure something by the value of the raw materials Computer chips are glorified sand, and we've got deserts full of that, yet some processors cost as much as a decent bike.

I can if the sand is turned into glass, which is cheap. Processors are dificult to make because of the things added to silicon and the research. I don't think or see that the process of making a bike is that difficult. This is the answer I am looking for, what part of bike manufactoring is so complex that it requires the cost equivalent of processor design, one of the most complex things on the planet?

 

[FrenchTart]

You're selectively quoting people, ignoring the posts that answer your questions and then re-posing the same questions. We could do a merry-go-round dance for another few hundred posts I guess but I'm not sure what purpose that would serve.

Your questions have already been answered. You're not really raising anything particularly shocking or eye-opening - replace the word "bike" with "almost every product you can buy" and the answers would be very similar.

edit: Lol. The latest post is even more face-palmy.

 

[Vonhelmet]

It's hardly a stagerring leap in technology!!

It really is. It's roughly the same shape, but you may as well say that cars had 4 wheels and an engine 100 years ago.

 

[grudas]

 

[Vonhelmet]

I think my point is the price between cost and production to sale is massively over inflated.
Yes technology has changed but with that in the last 30yrs so should have production technology, which should hand in hand keep the costs level with the past.
At cost of £100, are you justifying the price of £1000+ bikes to be totally production costs?

Show me the bike that cost £100 30 years ago and then we'll talk.