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In all seriousness, won't the push to introduce 2 new wheel standards just hurt the industry even more overall? Setting aside whether or not they're good from a ride quality perspective, I'd think that it will introduce a bunch of new SKUs they'll have to manage, will instantly make their current supply seem obsolete (restart the inventory glut), and further hurt sales of the current products when the early adopters sell their current bikes, leading to more discounting.

If only someone could push one (or two) new wheel sizes in the market, that would for sure help the struggling industry. 😉

Reasonably certain it was a case of the Pike being an older chassis over the Lyrik. Nothing to do with performance, just timelines.

In the days of the 36SL, I'm not sure why any 140mm or less bike is getting a new Lyrik, other than supplier partnerships. Seems like the 36SL is the objectively optimal fork for the Tempo. Is the Pike really too flexy to hammer? Anyway, now here's my maybe even hotter take: Sure, the commencal might be Cat 5, but I don't think bike companies can justify a short travel bike breaking or being less durable because people might ride it too hard. You can't make a bike with enduro-like geometry and then when people ride it fast on hard...

On this general train of thought, one thing I always thought could be genuinely beneficial to the consumer is size specific build kits, particularly on a bike like this. Put a 34 and exo tyres on the smaller sizes, with a 36 and exo+ tyres on the larger sizes. You could do similar things for rotors, bar width etc. More part numbers for the product managers but hey, we can dream.

This is a slight derail but I agree. My hot take is that the ride quality of the new Lyrik will never be good enough to justify the weight. The previous one was awesome, and so was the one before that. The fact that is being praised as much as it is, opens the door for the other big dogs to keep beefing up. Current Lyrik is nearly identical in weight to the previous gen 38... The Pike was a quality enduro fork in 2017... Please spec 120-140 fork travel bikes with pikes/non-obese Lyriks/36SLs or even 34's. I'm so sick...

Lots of people confusing their position on the USA with bikeconomics. Standert has always been most feasible in the EU, even in Australia they’re expensive with shipping and tax. Yes, tariffs are dumb and stuff is more expensive, but if you can call Walt, Steve Rex, Paul Sadoff, Cam Falconer, etc etc and go custom (plus choose your vibe) why would you not? It’s a different level of quality to production line frames too. the point about the micro brand and JIT is that Standert doesn’t really carry stock or debt in the way other brands do, and road bikes...

Not anymore. I did it on 1 frame and 1 fork, spending at least a couple hours of my time getting really high coverage. I still managed to scratch both in places where there was no coverage. Both only sold for about 30% of what they cost new, just a couple years later. So, not wasting my time or money on that again... I'll ride my bikes, and when they get scratched, don't really care. It means they're getting ridden, not sitting in my garage.

If you can handle a small town; Oakridge, OR is cheap and no sales tax. Year round riding. I don't think it has much in the way of jobs or a decent school system though....

This is a great discussion. Thanks to the people chiming in from cool locations all over the planet- I would love to check out Bulgaria and Romania! I have been to the northwestern region of Greece and it certainly had the topography for great riding. Knoxville sounds really cool. Affordable places with good riding will attract like minded people and the cycling community will build in a positive way. I spent a year in Newark, Delaware, many years ago. I thought I would not ride mtb much. Turns out there were several area's within riding distance from my door that...

Saying the Sea-to-Sky is “expensive” is an understatement. For the vast majority of people, it is so cost prohibitive you could never live there even if you wanted to. I was fortunate enough to grow up in Utah at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon. My childhood home to Snowbird/Alta (some of the best skiing in North America) was 8 miles and a 12 minute drive. I now have a PhD and could never afford to live anywhere near that same place even if I wanted to move back. Moving to a place like the east benches of Salt Lake...

I moved to Knoxville from Denver 5 years ago. Zero regrets. The west is great for looking at gorgeous mountains and for having over 300 days of rain-free riding per year. But the trails, campsites, and cool towns are hella crowded. Also, the toll of climate change on the Rockies is real, and the winters keep getting shorter and drier, and the smoke is getting more constant. I mean, we are all contributing to that, no matter where you live, with our car-centered life. But when you are literally driving out 70, into the mountains to have fun, and that...

Disagree - the weed industry is in the shits right now too. At least in California, it is. Someone must be doing well considering the sheer number of new $100K plus cars I see, even in the (at least what used to be) very blue collar neighborhood we're in.

The other killer for the mid tier brands is how good bikes have been for the past 7 years. I could go get a brand new uninspiring frame with select level suspension and house brand wheels. But I found a V1 Druid frame with a Cascade last winter for $900 and put my used nicer parts on it. My marketplace is full of Yetis and Pivots that are a few years old listed for the same price as a cheap new aluminum bike. If I'm going to spend more than a couple grand on a bike, I might as well...

Maybe their are not too many frame brands, but combined with the number of other brands that appear on a bike and the number of SKUs per frame I think it's crowded. Trek has 14 ebikes each with ~3 trims, plus 20 regular bikes with 5+ trims (not including kids bikes, and not differentiating between aluminum/carbon as different 'bikes', just different trims). That seems wild to me. Plus, the differentiator between each trim is someone else's products/sale for the most part (other than carbon/alu frames; i.e. the main difference between the entry level and top end bikes are SRAM/Shimano product...

I don’t think there’s too many brands, I think there’s too many brands in the middle of the K shaped economy. There will always be a demand for high end (SC, Pivot, Yeti, Ibis, Forbidden etc) and boutique (Atherton, Unno, Crestline, etc.) Transition I’d include in high end due to their warranty being excellent. Low end is all trying to hit a $5k price point on an Avinox ebike right now, because of Avinox’s own brand. In addition to all the great DTC offerings (Canyon, Ari, YT, etc) China (aforementioned X-lab) will be coming in soon and competing on price...

Consideration on the Cdale event. If you look at the bikes in Pon's portfolio, they're essentially competing against themselves in regard to design. Each MTB brand in their portfolio has a Horst option for instance. It'll be interesting to see if SC goes full monty on the design in the wake. It offers benefits over VPP from both performance and manufacturing standpoints. Not saying VPP is a bad performer, far from it, but it does have design and manufacturing challenges that are basically absent from a Horst bike. As a legacy brand Cdale really didn't bring much 'new' to differentiate...

The negative is obvious and terrible, 150 people losing their jobs and a local venue losing industry and community. My heart goes out to anyone affected by the layoffs, and I genuinely am pulling for Cannondale to work with out. That said, it feels like they're trying to conglomerate the brands under one roof, they've slowly been doing this in the background with some of the B2B systems, and as a shop guy, I can't say the idea of having one rep for multiple brands bothers me at all. One stop shop kind of thing in many respects. We're not...

With the exception of the covid, every major financial crisis in the US economy in the past 50 years has been directly caused by the Financial Services Sector. They spend oodles of $$ "lobbying" (AKA buying govt policy), to minimize govt oversight. Not foolin us today, Diddy.

Yes, but it is neither taxed nor regulated nearly enough. You sound like Lance Armstrong … “I’m the most tested athlete of all time”… The financialization of the global economy is very clearly a rigged game, and the players in the game are barely, barely, barely accountable in this country.