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Guys, I know you don't want to hear this... but the racks on that new Levo 4 X monstrosity are really cool. Those ugly Levo X racks move all of the cargo on the bike from unsprung mass to sprung mass. As forum dwellers, we should all be able to appreciate why that's going to ride better, even if the XX cranks, the paint job, and the S-works price point are all serious headscratchers. If you don't believe me, check out this writeup from Travis Engel at the Radavist on a similar front rack design that he bodged together on...

Yes, it's suffering, but the wrong kind, it must feel bad from the start, not accidental. Now back to rumors!

If anyone doesnt understand this bike I dont blame him, neither did I. But after spending few days in a Sud Tyrol town, through which runs a long distance cycle path that connects Northern Italy and Germany my perception changed big time: I only used said cycle path to link different trails for few km at the time but I'd encounter hundreds of elder people riding such bikes. It was eye opening and I realized there exist bike markets I had no idea about...

"emtb can't give me suffering" Spoken like a man that has never run out of battery halfway into a group ride 😁

Do these numbers reflect ALL bike sales or just the sale of MTBs in Germany? Their cycling infrastructure is much, much better than most NA cities and cycling is actually a safe method of transportation. Are these numbers just being skewed as people switch to urban centric E-bikes as a preferred method of transportation? Also, it would seem that trail access in America is a concern that in some areas may steer people to analog MTBs still. Locally, it does seem like a DH bike and an emtb in the trail category is becoming more popular.

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 🤘

Europe is ahead of US ebike adoption, no doubt, but some thought it would reach an 80% market share. That seems to be stalling out now with ebikes as a whole, not specifically eMTB. This gift link should work: https://www.bike-eu.com/52440/e-bike-market-share-in-europe-stalls-far-…

To me it is wild to hear Trek pulling back that hard. Their Marlin hardtail is (was?) available in 4 different specifications. Each of those specifications has 3 colour options. There is also 8 sizes available across the line. That's a total of 96 options across that line of bike. They're not historically scared of having a shit load of SKU's to look after.

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...

I think it is because we do not smoke cigarettes on our pedal to the mountaintop cafe while needing enough breath to complain about immigration

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...

This is why European venues have the upper hand through local government subsidising tourism projects. Nobody knew about Loudenvielle 15 years ago, then they put the gondola linking the pretty village by the lake to the ski resort up above and developed a trail network mainly below the snow line. This takes years and a sustained effort to make destinations tourist honeypots.

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...

(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...

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...

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."

I have no issue with software teams using "agile" in whatever the original context was. I have issues with what it became in the corporate world. Over my year long in-house counsel contract, I think I attended 4-5 mandatory "agile" training seminars, and it featured heavily at our multi-day retreat. To this day I'm not really sure what it means, except that the "agile coaches" sound like new-age grifters when given a microphone in front of a crowd of people that are mandated to be there. Worse yet was inevitably after one of these seminar things, I'd be on a...