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If you didn't document your ride, did you even ride, bro?
CHORT! And to be fair that could also be the ones we show our significant others. "The video really makes it look way slower/smaller/flatter than it really was"
Yes, trust me (enduro)bro.
"Speaking to the eBike riders I see on the trails here, they're all shifting to lower-priced bikes as they've realized that they can without sacrificing performance." This lines up with a hypothesis I've been thinking about for a while, which is that I think so much of the weirdness of the bike industry and bike customers (obsession with grams and weight, obsession over granular differences in tire feel and suspension tuning, and willingness to spend enormous amounts to customize and upgrade a stock bike) comes down to the weakness of the human motor and the human mind.
We only generate around a quarter or a half of a horsepower, which means every little thing creates a perceivable difference in bike handling, and because huffing and puffing is hard and humans don't like sweating more than they need to, we're willing to spend inordinate amounts of time and money in the hope of reducing our huffing and puffing. Example: old out of shape guy on a carbon aero road bike with GP5000's and deep dish aero rims. No matter how many times Dario or I say "bike weight doesn't matter," people's legs and lungs are still going to be screaming for relief on climbs, and any perceived solution is going to be welcomed with open arms and open wallets.
With an ebike, all of that logic changes pretty quickly. Rhythm or performance level-suspension works pretty darn well on a heavy ebike because the mass eliminates a lot of bumps. DH tires pedal just fine when you've got 1000+ watts backing up your feet. And suddenly shelling out $1000 for lighter cranks becomes an exercise in decoration only, because your mind can't sense or justify any meaningful difference in bike weight anymore. It's harder to pretend there's a meaningful impact after investing in performance upgrades.
I've given a lot of thought to the impact of the weak motor and weak mind on traditional bike sales, but @swoopswoop until you mentioned it, I hadn't thought about the leveling effect of ebikes on performance and pricing. Thanks to the decades of tweaking and puzzling from riders of traditional pedal bikes, any ebike company today can pretty easily create a geometry design, suspension design, and component spec that works great for 99% of riders. Which means it really does boil down to the motor and battery.
I think you are right.
What is weird is that I still see tons of fully kitted out ebikes in my area, with the latest factory electronic suspension, wireless everything, carbon, titanium, etc. Which really makes NO DIFFERENCE on a 50+ lb ebike. But...these guys like the bling and they have already put every doodad on their Tacoma, so what's left.
The lower priced ebikes mean they can spend the rest of the money on "upgrades". The mountain bike marketing is SO GOOD at convincing people that they need the latest $150 radial tire in order to make that one climb on their nearest blue trail.
I find myself regressing more and more into old and obsolete "vintage" bikes the more of this I see.
We did see a shift a few years back from 2 year to 3 year cycles... Some companies said it was to give more development time, I think they also wanted more time to recoup tooling costs..
Also, companies seem less likely to wait for a certain time of the year to release new bikes bow.. Especially if the current model is pretty much sold out and the new one is ready to go..
To be fair, I used “going concern” imprecisely here.
The normal accounting assumption is that a company is a going concern, meaning it is expected to keep operating. What I meant was the bad version: language in a 10-Q, 10-K, or auditor report saying there is “substantial doubt” about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern, often referred to as a going concern warning.
That does not mean bankruptcy is guaranteed. But it does mean there is meaningful risk the business may not be able to keep operating over the next year without raising money, selling assets, refinancing, restructuring, being sold, or otherwise materially changing its situation.
I meet lots of younger folk thru work. I think most older folk would be astounded by the number of kids who see far less media (social and otherwise) than your average millennial/ gen xer
Half a decade of click clacking probably didn’t help either
Posting for the sake of updating your friends on your life is largely dead. Young kids are the first to correctly recognize that they have to always be giving a performance if there’s any chance they’ll be on camera because they’re always at risk of being the subject of a viral moment. Be hawk tuah or be nothing
This is why I probably won't ever buy a complete e-bike - I want to slap on a bunch of CUES parts, coil suspension plus DH wheels and tires, so a bare/minimal frame makes much more sense. I see no reason to drop $15k on a carbon bike with XTR/XX/Factory/Ultimate when I'll be stripping those parts off for something more practical and less expensive.
The Pope reads Vitalmtb forums confirmed
Dibs on the "Be Hawk Tuah or Be Nothing" tee shirt.
I see little bit of this concept from the periphery. To reiterate what Jeff said, someone uttering the words "going concern" is akin to saying "cancer." If it's worth verbalizing the fact the entity might not be a "going concern," it ain't good - regardless what "stage" the problem is in.
Less nerdy people could think of it like this: if a bike is so clapped out that it isn't really rideable and the best thing for the owner to do is part it out and get whatever they can for the parts that still work and have value, the bike is no longer a "going concern." In other words, the bike/entity is no longer greater than the sum of its parts.
Jeff - please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.
Or at least not share everything?
Old habits die hard.
Saddleback enters administration...
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/major-uk-cycling-business-saddleback-…
Watching the footage back I filmed in 2011-2012 with my Hero2 was enough to make me decide to never buy another action cam.
Came here to post this! Real shame, I used to order stuff from them via my lbs - always arrived super quick, great cust service whenever anything went wrong. Fingers crossed this wont impact Nukeproof Axess Racing - they seemed to have pretty close ties with them and some of their brands.
Idk radial tires are amazing.
Unfortunate to see a quality distributor find themselves in too deep and have to go down this path. They had a number of premium brands and, by all accounts, did some pretty heavy lifting on the marketing front, which can't be said of all distributors. Losing Cannondale and Enve certainly didn't help matters, but I would also guess Castelli and TLD (premium clothing) were a drag, and brands like Pivot and King likely carry some heavy inventory dollar/pounds. I don't know about the UK, but Silca is always on sale here, so likely some margin pressure for a distributor, and Abbey doesn't really have traditional margins on tools with their "pro" focus.
I do still wonder how much the downfall of CRC/Wiggle pulled down distributors in the UK. There have been a number of exits from the business in recent times - Moore Large, Paligap, Raleigh (Accell), etc. For a lot of brands, I would guess that upwards of 50% of their business with their UK distributor was heading to CRC/Wiggle, with a large portion of that then going international. UK distributors benefited greatly before it all crumbled.
We all know the business side of bikes evolves at snail's pace, but I have to wonder how long the traditional distributor model survives in major markets. The very definition of a middleman in a compressed margin, retail price-sensitive world. B2B sites, independent reps, and 3PL warehouses cost less (in theory) than the 30-35 points a distributor requires.
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