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The German market isn't reflective of North America; and possibly other core MTB markets like Australia and New Zealand, however small they might be. The amount and quality of riding in North America, for example, fosters a completely different riding culture. Of course eMTB has a place here in North America, but we still have a large percentage or riders that want the analog experience. Squamish is a good example of a super core area for riders and, while eMTBs are seemingly everywhere there, my anecdotal perspective is that the split is still in favour of analog. My prediction is...

The headset cable routing edition of suspension layout.

Yo dawg! We put your shock inside your frame so it’s covered and we put a hole in your shock cover so your shock isn’t covered when it’s covered 🤘

Maybe it's a subsidized assembly fee or something. I don't know how Spesh works, but when someone buys a Norco online they pass on the normal margin to the shop that gets the bike and assembles it for the customer which makes it not a problem for the dealers that they sell online through their own website.

$89 to go to the bike shop and pick up your own bike?

Great question. To your point, I think the cannibalism is worse than that, because instead of wanting multiple pedal bikes for different sorts of pedal days with granular differences between each model, one ebike is pretty much fine for everything. In the past, as a MTB pedaler, I would have loved to have at least three mountain bikes: a long travel enduro bike, a shorter travel trail bike, and maybe a hardtail or XC bike. Maybe more. If I wanted to give up on pedaling and get an ebike instead, I don't need two ebikes. For ebikers who want to...

Posting this here because it seems more bikeonomics related than tech rumours related, but it's sort of in reply or brought about to the discussion going on over there. I'm curious about eMTBs's impact on the MTB "market cap", whether you want to measure that by industry dollars or total number of riders or some other metric ("rider cap?"). I don't think this can be answered decisively as we haven't had enough years of clean data (setting aside any data-gathering difficulties or whether that's really happening industry wide) in the sense that eMTB has really only taken off recently in...

Ive been pondering the e-bike vs regular bike debate a bit recently, and if that conflict is unique to North America only at this point? From what I gather, Europe has heavily embraced e-biking in all forms, to the point where is it somewhat the default choice for most people. Here in the US, the debate of e-bike vs regular bike is still very much a point on contention, but that seems to be something unique to America biking culture, and not so much the rest of the world. Am I wrong on this, or is American protestant work/suffer culture...

Trek would be smart to pull an Orbea. Combine your DH/Enduro into one and base it on your long travel e-bike. 3 in 1.

Something weird is definitely happening at Trek. For Canada at least even their latest e-bikes aren't available until September (based on clicking on various models on their website). Happy to be proven wrong but that's what I found.

All those other models make sense but Trek is seriously going to discontinue the Session? What happens to Trek Factory Racing? Also surprising since the Session is one of the DH bikes I see the most in my neck of the woods. It seems like they sold well...for a DH bike.

(Cross-post from the Bike Economics thread; if people don't think it's relevant to this thread, I'll delete it) My friend (- owner of a small chain of bike shops) just told me that, a couple of days ago, Trek informed their dealerships that there's going to be a lot of change in their product line-up in the near future. Apparenly Trek is discontinuing a bunch of models, including the Session, Slash, Remedy and Top Fuel. The way the announcement was worded makes it seem like there's no direct plans for updates or replacement models for any of them, they'll simply...

It’s the combo of paint and build kit that boggles my mind. You’re right, there is a market for this kind of bike but this particular build is bizarro

That Levo X is weird with that parts kit but put Deore level stuff on it and paint it camo and they'll sell an absolute shit ton of them.

I highly doubt trail associations need an Sworks bike that costs 3x the price of a good enough alternative.

luckily you can just buy the cheaper alloy levo 4 and then add the racks, saving you 7k each.

Big changes apparently happening at Trek. My friend (- owner of a small chain of bike shops) just told me that, a couple of days ago, Trek informed their dealerships that there's going to be a lot of change in their product line-up in the near future. Apparenly they are discontinuing a bunch of models, including the Session, Slash, Remedy and Top Fuel. The way the announcement was worded makes it seem like there's no direct updates or replacement models planned for any of them. For Trek's mtb line-up, this would only leave the Supercaliber and the Fuel (EX, LX...

How organizers still approach elite sports events as standalone products instead of marketing assets still blows my mind. In most cases, a World Cup weekend will never generate positive revenue if you only look at the direct cashflow during the event itself. The picture changes once you factor in media coverage, long term tourism, bike sales, brand image, destination marketing and overall communication value. A World Cup should be part of a bigger strategy and not treated as a one weekend business case. If a region has no long term MTB vision, no plans to grow the scene, infrastructure or...

I attended Lake Placid last year (my first ever world cup event) and wondered how they were making any money. Tickets were cheap and there didn’t seem to be a lot of folks in attendance at the XC races. I guess not enough to cover their costs.

Quote from article. "After spending more than $860,000 to put on three days of mountain bike races in the fall of 2025, the authority brought in less than $300,000 in revenue from ticket sales and parking from the downhill and cross-country cycling competitions, records show. The baseline costs for hosting the UCI event required ORDA to make payments of $420,000 to $500,000 a year for the rights to put on the races."