The bike industry is, like any industry, home to aspects that are great and things that boil our brakes.
But, from the outside, some of these positive and negative aspects can be missed. In the spirit of openness, we wanted to talk about them.
So here are five things we love and six we think the bike industry could improve on.
5 things we love about the bike industry
Big brands aren’t faceless corporations – they’re bike nerds like us
Amazingly, huge brands such as Trek, SRAM, Shimano and even the marketing machine that is Specialized, are populated by actual people. What’s more, these people are mostly of the really nice variety.
Product launches, trade shows and other events enable us to meet them face-to-face, often over a coffee or beer, and chat about bikes.
It may come as a shock, but these people are generally just big bike nerds who want to make what they sell a bit better each year.
Access to star riders
If you tried to interview Cristiano Ronaldo before a big football match, you wouldn’t get past the outer ring of his security.
But sidle up to Mathieu van der Poel or Marianne Vos on the start line of the gravel world championships and they’ll happily give you a few minutes of their time (I know because I’ve done it).
Even Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar has delved deep into his training data in public forums. That said, knowing he can put out more watts than my threshold power while barely breaking a sweat isn’t exactly useful information.
The fact is we generally have incredible access to the biggest pro riders, be that on a road or mountain bike. Long may it continue.
A lot of brands take feedback onboard
Sometimes lowly reviewers and the general riding public can feel like minnows compared to the giant brands of the bike industry.
So it can be gratifying to see a brand alter something such as a head angle or spec choice when your review or rider feedback has highlighted it as an issue.
While we’re not about to be consulted on the details of future products, it's always nice to see brands taking feedback onboard because, ultimately, this improves the products we all use.
Lots of people conduct thorough testing – and share the results for free
If you love to consume cycling content, there has never been a better time to do so.
Alongside BikeRadar, creators such as AeroCoach, Shane Miller, DC Rainmaker, Nor-Cal, Dylan Johnson, Escape Collective and many more are conducting in-depth, independent testing to answer burning questions.
Some of this content may be behind a paywall, of course, but the majority is free – with written versions alongside videos and podcasts. The choice you have is, in our opinion, excellent.
It’s hard to buy a bad bike now
The final positive we’d like to highlight is it’s quite difficult to buy a bad bike these days.
If you have a healthy budget, you have a plethora of fast and light road bikes to choose from.
Even those at the less expensive end still deliver wide tyre clearance and good shifting performance. Shifting like this would have been cutting-edge when I got my first serious bike around 16 years ago.
On the MTB side, things are even better. Budget mountain bikes have benefitted greatly from 1x drivetrains, better suspension, tubeless tyres, progressive geometry and good brakes.
We’re at a point, now, where a £600 / $600 mountain bike can be a lot of fun to ride. This means people who are new to the sport are more likely to stick with it.
And more people on bikes is always a good thing.
6 things we hate about the bike industry
Vague and unsubstantiated claims
It is incredibly frustrating when brands make claims without data to support them. It doesn’t help us or you, and it’s not a good look for the brand.
Specialized, for example, claimed its S-Works Ares shoes deliver a whopping 7-watt increase in power to the pedals and can make you 14 seconds faster over 10km.
These numbers supposedly came from lab testing, but Specialized didn’t divulge details of the testing protocol or what assumptions were being made, so it’s hard to know how meaningful the claims are in the real world.
However, it’s more annoying given the detail brands – Specialized included – will go into about the testing they’ve done for other projects.
We’d love to see the industry simply being more open. It surely benefits us all.
Apples-to-pears comparisons
Trek’s latest eighth-generation Madone came with a much lighter weight, but also a promise that this slimmed-down bike was just as fast as the outgoing aero machine.
Annoyingly, however, Trek tested the new bike with its new aero water bottles and cages. Meanwhile, the outgoing Madone was tested with standard round bottles and regular cages – despite the new cages being compatible with the old bike.
Without the fancy bottles, the new Madone was, Trek admitted, slower than the old bike (at least according to the wind tunnel).
Product launches in far-away places
This may be hard to believe, but while it can be a joy to ride new bikes in sunny and interesting places, doing so may not always enable us to produce the best content.
Certainly, it’s easy to see why a brand wants to show off its new toy in the best light possible.
At an event where they control your timetable, brands are able to control the narrative to an extent. The bigger issue, though, is riding a bike in conditions it's perfectly suited to doesn’t enable us to tell whether it’s any good anywhere else.
Of course, we could – as some outlets have chosen to – decline to attend such launches, but there can be benefits to press trips.
Access to experts within brands we rarely speak to can be a huge benefit, giving us precious insight we might never otherwise have received. It's also useful to have a period of focused time with the product.
But, for a more realistic review of a product – and to be more environmentally friendly – it would be preferable if brands could arrange press trips that don’t always require time on a plane.
Some brands don’t want to send us mid-range bikes
This could be seen as a ‘woe betide us’ complaint too, but brands usually want to send us the top-end model of their latest bikes.
Once again, this is rarely the best way to review a bike. After all, how bad can a £12,000 / $14,000 bike, with top-of-the-range everything, be? And is it even relevant to the majority of our readers?
We would much rather receive the second, third or fourth-tier bikes, with specs that inevitably have to make some compromises. These are the ones with more realistic price tags and therefore the ones we’re all more likely to buy, after all.
We need more universal standards
We’ve saved a classic for last.
To a large extent we have come through the bottom bracket wars of the early 2010s and axle standards have mostly settled down.
But we still see the odd trail bike using the rear axle from an enduro bike, and there is no agreed way to route cables and brake hoses through an integrated front end.
While SRAM made a good step with its Universal Derailleur Hanger, most bikes rely on a proprietary (and typically flimsy) piece of metal that, if broken, can be a nightmare to replace.
We’ve said this before, but if the bike industry could agree on a set of universal standards, we might start believing God really is a cyclist after all.
