This tariff stuff is not the best idea for the US to bring back leading industrial businesses. We need to remember it’s a big world. The US is not the one and only market for goods as some may think. Here are some stats on the bike industry as a whole;
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That many mismanaged and misinterpreted.
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I should have finished my thought when I wrote the message, I mentioned to say that prices are gonna go up and not gonna be back despite changes in the tariffs. Specialized still charging the $500 extra due to tariffs even during the 90 days tax break we are currently under.
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Only some of the tariff increases were paused. My understanding is the across the board increases announced on the so called Liberation Day were left in place. In general, it’s only been the later increases that have been paused.
Reminds me of a bunch of years ago when fuel prices raised and the airlines bumped up their prices to account for the dollar/barrel costs. They never retracted them when costs fell. Bastards.
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GC Performance is talking about price cuts.Some Specialized bikes are way down from their lofty covid highs.
The comments to that video are interesting.
The truth is, bike prices have gone up (to outer space) while components and what you get have gone down. It is hard to sell an expensive bike. Yes, everything is more expensive now and bikes are way better than they were just 5+ years ago… but 15k for the top spec’d bike is pretty wild and people have a really hard time spending that much money on anything, let alone a bike. Unless you have money to burn you’d be better off getting a 3k bike and upgrade as stuff wears out.
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I’ve never understood how the companies (especially Specialized) transitioned to charging more for a complete bike than the components. When I started with road bikes, a complete bike was always cheaper than piecing it together yourself and that seemed true for decades up until recent times.
Specialized turns a $5000 frameset, $2500 groupset and $2000 wheels into a $15000 bike plus they manufactured the frameset, wheels, bars, stem at their cost and bought the groupset at the best wholesale price.
The comments are funny. I agree with some of them. The motorcycle comparison always makes me think. Somehow Ducati can make a motorcycle with very advanced suspension, an engine with hundreds of moving parts, and sell it for what a high end bicycle costs.
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When I heard that I was sad. I’d LOVE to get a Ducati Monster. To think that it would be cheaper than a ‘good’ bicycle is rather amazing. So is the car my in-laws bought before my wife was born. It was a ‘loaded’ Mustang, and it cost somewhere less that 5 grand. That price seems so wrong. Now it would cost somewhere north of what, $60,000? $70,000? $80,000? 
Trek and Specialized should be reducing their prices now…right? 
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and refunding those that paid the $500
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I looked at the prices. Sure, they make expensive models but also less expensive models in the ballpark of a high end road bike. Substitute Honda if Ducati is too exotic.
This is not totally fair comparison, ask any AI:
“number of midrange motorcycles produced vs highend bicycles and how does it affect pricing?”
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Motorbike vs bicycle cost, been a long while since I watched but this covers most of it.
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The Ducati Monster ‘Starts as $12,995’, the cheapest Hypermotard is $13,995, the Diavel is $27,195, with the XDiavel at $28,995. Multistrada V2 is $15,995, Streetfighter V2 is $14,995.
Yeah, they are not $40,000, but they aren’t ‘cheap’ when compared to the nose bleed high prices of some bicycles. Maybe Ducati has raised their prices along with the ‘sea level’ of every other company, and that comparison doesn’t work anymore. Sure there are really nose bleed prices for bicycles, but the average person isn’t buying a bike that cost more than their first car. (I wish I could afford a bike like that, but I also realize my Roubaix is/was a fantastic bike at around $4,000 at the time. For those that can, more power to you, but complaining about the pricing of sky-high bikes is rather ridiculous)
That is just the price for paint on a mustang GTD if you want to take the paint to sample option and lock out option so that no one else can have one in your color. You can option one out over a half a million.. but that’s not even remotely a normal mustang.
65, random year, mustang would have been about 2500 bucks, that would be a little under 30k today, mustangs start at a little over 30k today. Cars in recent years (think last 2 decades) have generally stayed under inflation. Example (with rounding) in 2000 a golf 1.8t would be about 20k. In 2020 a golf 1.8t was about 20k.
Cars are not a great example for this conversation though as you can see from the golf pricing because they generally make giant leaps in improvements in 20 years but the prices don’t change as much. Bicycles go up by a lot in that time and motorcycles somewhere between cars and bikes.
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Great video. It would be interesting to see a more technical breakdown of the bill of materials of building a bicycle and motorcycle.
I’ll say that bike vs. motorcycle is not a hill I wanted to die on. I could care less.
From that video, what stood out was that motorcycle makers and dealers take 15% each. In the cycling industry it’s 30% and 30% plus the groupset maker’s cut.
What I think pushes higher end bikes even higher is the duopoly status of Shimano and Sram. Motorcycle makers make every part on an assembly line. The bicycle maker has to buy all the parts from other companies who also want their 30%.
The other half of it is high end framesets. With a $5000+ frameset, bits of carbon are put in a mold in a factory in Asia and a frame comes out. Supposedly they put in a few bits of high modulus carbon in a fancier layup. These days, you often don’t get an amazing paint job on a $5k frame.
The $2-3k frame is made in exactly the same way with the same labor, maybe in the same mold and often with the same black paint raw finish. To me this is where Specialized extracts it’s S-Works branding tax because the cost differential to make an S-Works versus a non S-Works is going to be very small. The different layup doesn’t cost extra and the different grade of carbon or bits of high modulus don’t cost much more.
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The motorcycle vs bicycle cost comparison is always fairly disingenuous.
It’s always a low-end or mid-range motorcycle compared to a top-spec bicycle.
If one wants to compared a top tier S-Works Tarmac to a motorcycle, they ought to at least compare it with a motorcycle that’s actually race worthy.
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Why? Maybe an unpopular opinion but shouldn’t a low end motorcycle be more than a top end bicycle?
If not… why?
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