Agreed, this notion that somehow companies that manufacture their own products somehow magically make higher quality products is absolute bunk. I have seen some absolute junk come out of in house manufacturing, and some incredibly well manufactured products come off contract manufacturing lines. It all comes down to how well you understand your product/ process, and how much you’re willing to spend on quality (both on front end design quality and in process).
@duje.jelaska Agreed, it doesn’t matter who owns the factory or which company’s name is on the pay slip of the engineer/QA people, just that they’re the ones driving the process.
Giant is probably the only company on my shortlist for the next bike, who manufacture their own bikes. Look and Time do (maybe not the lower end ones?), but they’re just not within my budget anymore. Specialized don’t own factories, but have solid engineering in house and work with better factories (i.e. not one you will find selling frames on Aliexpress for $300). Cannondale, Trek etc, the last I heard, they did not own the China/Taiwan factories they used. But I really don’t trawl the internet to stay on top of this stuff, I just notice snippets here and there.
Buying a $300 aliexpress special road bike that weighs 850 grams, has a far higher chance that it will structurally fail. The chance might go from 1 in 10,000 (for a Tarmac/Madone/Emonda etc) to 1 in 1000. So it’s still not definitely going to fail, but the chance of it is far higher. (these likelihoods are guesses based of no research). So you can meet 999 riders who have the $300 aliexpress frame and swear how safe it is, but then there’s 1 rider out there who had theirs fail.
Buying a western branded bike that is just the same $300 aliexpress bike and having a nicer paint job and a US distribution system, and perhaps a little more quality control, will surely put you somewhere in between. Say 1 in 5,000. The US company is more worried about being taken to court and if you’re selling the bikes in the US, there are standards etc you have to deal with that a Chinese manufacturer who just EMS’s the package to the US doesnt.
Smart people using good engineering to design the bike, methodical people to test it, and methodical people to set up the process and process controls. Do that, and you have the best chance of making a bike which is strong enough for it’s purpose, but not needlessly overbuilt/heavy. That to me, would equal the original posters question.
While this is true, I don’t think that’s what I meant. It does make a difference somewhat, I think, because it tells you how that company works and how it is driven. Any of these strategies have their strengths and weaknesses, but can ultimately work. Smaller companies like 3T and especially Open want to stay small, serve a niche market and rely on exceptional talent at the top. It makes complete sense for them to stay small and outsource manufacturing to a trusted partner and rely on their contacts in the industry.
Apple makes probably the best mass market products with the best tolerances — and they don’t do the actual manufacture at all. But they work with contract manufacturers and are really meticulous.
I think Rotor and Look see themselves more as engineering companies with deep expertise in manufacturing, and they want to leverage that. It seems that Look really does seem to have an edge in carbon manufacturing, although at the expense of weight (which isn’t as big an issue anymore, at least as long as the UCI’s weight limit is important).
BMC prides itself in its ACE design tool suite with which they design bikes on supercomputers. So that’s the edge they see in themselves.
So from this end, it makes sense that Chinese manufacturers who want to grow out of being the Foxconn of bikes (= contract manufacturer) to a bike company in their own right to approach this from the manufacturing side and bootstrap their business this way. But eventually they will have to invest in engineering and design — you can only get so far in “copying” others (and I don’t mean this in a necessarily bad way).