Bike Prices.

ChroniC

ChroniC

ChroniC

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
10,192
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.
 
Vonhelmet said:
I'm going to buy myself 6Kg of aluminium and a chisel. Wish me luck!
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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?


touch said:
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
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As someone pointed out, inflation can only account for a rise in a few hundred max.
 
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Vonhelmet said:
Derailleurs are not the same as 30 years ago.
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50-7012-NCL-SIDE.jpg

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It's hardly a stagerring leap in technology!!

Vonhelmet said:
You can't measure something by the value of the raw materials :confused: Computer chips are glorified sand, and we've got deserts full of that, yet some processors cost as much as a decent bike.
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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?
 
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touch said:
Why are you focusing on bikes anyway? They are far from the worst.

Overclockers sell a cpu for almost £2k. It contains a few grams of metal and some silicon. Material costs are probably less than £1.

I want you to give me a logical explanation why overclockers are ripping me off at 2000% markup!
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Because I can understand the technology involved in micro processing design, my processor doesn't work with some metal slapped on some sand, the intricacies of micro production are infinity more difficult than welding some tubes together. Stop focusing on material costs, if you can't back up why bike design is so expensive?
 
touch said:
Which is exactly what everybody in this thread has been telling you...
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But!! yet not a single person has been able to justify why design is so expensive? Other than saying it is......
I want to know why! I haven't been trying to derail this thread in saying I don't agree with the costs, I have been asking why the hell they are so high.

Vonhelmet said:
And bikes don't work unless you know exactly what you're doing with 6-12kg of carbon fibre, resin, aluminium, steel, rubber, etc.

This simply boils down to you not understanding something and then claiming it's too expensive. There's more than enough that you can read if you want to understand why a frame costs as much as it does or is as difficult to manufacture as it is, or why VCLS means something and is important, and so on.
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You say this but I can't. I cannot find anywhere that explains a frames cost above the cost of the aluminuim and a man to bend and weld it. I have watched how it's made and the likes and looked into the process, and it is very simple and most mechanically done, and mass produced.
 
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