None of them. That was my point. So why do bike companies do the equivalent with massive brand names all over the frame. It looks rubbish.
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Exactly.
My Aspero says Cervelo in small lettering on the top tube near the headset. I quiet like it. It’s small, subtle, and classy. I’m not opposed to the brand name on the down tube tho.
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Simple…advertising. Case in point - I was driving yesterday and a vehicle passed me with a bike in hitch mount. All black paint, no logos (not even black on black treatment that I could see). Was clearly a high-end bike with SRAM eTap and hydro brakes…but I have no idea what brand it was.
(Side note…guy still had the spoke protector on his rear wheel. Somebody should confiscate his ride. 
)
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Totally understand some branding/logos, but why do they make them so big and gaudy. It’s unnecessary.
Because all bikes of a certain type look like each other to some extent. Without the big branding most people would be hard pressed to differentiate a Tarmac from an Emonda from a TCR.
For cars one of their key development parameters is the aesthetic. Brands will gladly make the car less aero or weigh more if it means it looks the way they want it to look. They are also very large, so branding that is easily seen is much smaller relative to the whole than with a bike. It’s also on the rear of the car so that you can see it while you are driving behind it.
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Was just about to write this. Take the badges off and I could easily pick out the Mercedes, BMW or Audi from any lineup of cars. Easy to spot the difference between a Lambo, a Ferrari, an Aston or a McLaren. And I’m not particularly into cars, a car just has a lot of ways you can make it distinctive.
I spend way more time looking at bikes than cars, and honestly if you took the branding off I would really struggle to tell the difference between a lot of them. You can distinguish between the categories (aero vs endurance vs climbing/classic) but between brands? No chance for most of them. Especially with all the different builds out there for each frame, and the fact that they tend to release new versions every year or 2 vs cars which typically run more like 6-10 years before a new model comes out.
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Is that the new Tarmac in the photo? Without seeing the seatpost I don’t know how to tell the difference between it and the venge 
.
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Just an assumption on my part.
But i think the new shallow wheels would look odd on the venge unlike in the photo.
I take your points but just don’t think they need to be soooo big (I think of the ridiculous recent trek efforts). Good quality logos can be just as effective and not as obtrusive in my opinion. Why not offer the customer more choice, especially at this price point?
Back in the day when I was doing product development work, one of our goals was to have our bikes be recognizable without any paint. We had a few distinct frame characteristics that we included on every bike that were functional as well as aesthetic.
That has become somewhat harder to do these days with the advent of disc brakes and other components,
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And that is still the case. There was a quiz on CyclingTips(? Might have been Bike radar) a couple months ago that had bike silhouettes and you tried to identify them. I was able to get 8/10 or so. Which means that bikes still look different but I also spend way too much time looking at bikes and have a pretty good eye for detail. But like you said bikes definitely look more similar than 20 years ago. There are a finite amount of ways to make a bike as aero as possible or as light as possible while working with the design constraints of UCI rules and such.
To 99.9% of people that are buying bikes, there are road bikes (small tires, drop bars), mountain bikes (big wheels, suspension, flat bars), and commuter/hybrid (smaller tires, flat bars, racks). And within those 3 groups every bike basically looks the same. So they need the logos on the bikes to differentiate things. Some brands to a better job of doing it stylistically or subtly though.
They do offer choice - the Trek Madone that you’re referring to only has the enormous logo on some models, others have a much more discreet black on black smaller logo. As well as offering the Project One option for people who want to go custom on their paint.
If you’re seeing bikes with obnoxiously large logos it’s because people have chosen to buy them that way 
Fair enough on Trek/Project One. Was really just meaning Specialized, so bad example. I just want a nice new S-Works Tarmac without huge fonts all over it, that isn’t black. But apparently that’s too much to ask for. I hope I’m pleasantly surprised.
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[quote=“mwglow15, post:93, topic:30822, full:true”] Some brands to a better job of doing it stylistically or subtly though.
[/quote]
I think this is the key point.
I guess Specialized take the view that if you’re going to spend extra $$$ on an S-Works frame that looks exactly the same externally as the standard lower grade carbon Tarmac, then you’re going to want people to know about it!
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I’ve been checking this thread every day for updates.
I wonder if they’ll wait until the tour to announce this one
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Same here.
Waiting for the tour might be favorable in terms of publicity and marketing. However, letting the entire summer pass and releasing in the beginning of fall might scare many customers away…
I would have suggested any launch will be shaped by available stock levels of any new model at Specialized and ensuring their ongoing supply chain remains robust. Two hurdles most manufacturers have little or no control over
Why invest in a launch when you can’t meet customer expectation and needs?
It also provides manufacturers the opportunity to exhaust older stock without the need to incentivise sales with reduced prices.
We’ve yet to see what cost cutting within the industry will look like post Covid 19 and the impact on R&D, it’s a reasonable expectation for manufacturers to focus on revenue growth and the E bike segment offers this in abundance. I appreciate it’s not a binary equation , road bikes or E bikes, however the weighting of investment will be towards e bikes.
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The selling season for high-end bikes has traditionally been the Fall and Winter…riders get through the season and then look to dump their old bikes and get new ones in advance of the season. So in this case, waiting to debut it at the Tour lines up well with that seasonality.
The bigger question is availability. Everyone’s supply chain got out of what with COVID19. Coming out of Chinese New year, factories were shut down for extended lengths of time…and that was for critical “meat & potatoes” models, i.e. lower-middle end of the price range. Spring is the prime selling season for those models and shops are literally sold out with no resupply. New product is likely starting to hit the shores now, or relatively soon, but everyone is playing catch-up on that. Tarmacs and Venges are sexy and get lots of eyeballs, but Rockhoppers and Hard Rocks pay the bills.
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Just a side note - there is still nothing showing on the UCI approval list from 10th June under Specialised or Tarmac that suggest a new model is ‘ready’ - unless it’s not UCI legal and on that basis why wait for the tour, as it wouldn’t be being used.