For the first time in its 52-year history, Giant Bicycles opened the doors to its GTM (Giant Taiwan Manufacturing) facility in Tai Chung, Taiwan – and BikeRadar was there to witness the manufacturing of Giant's 10th-generation 2025 TCR road bike.
The cutting-edge GTM centre is where Giant builds every one of its premium performance bikes across road, gravel and mountain biking.
The 2025 TCR was designed, developed and manufactured at the GTM and we were able to see the new bike being built from thread to tarmac.
Any Giant bicycle bearing 'Advanced' in its name is produced in Tai Chung, be it a mountain bike, gravel, cyclocross or road bike. It's also the centre of production for premium Cadex components and Giant's carbon wheel production.
The Advanced composites side of Giant arrived with the TCR and expanded to all of the brand's professional-standard bikes. The original TCR, launched in 1997, is undoubtedly one of the most important road bikes of the last 30 years, having a huge influence on modern bike design.
The TCR was the brainchild of the legendary British bike designer and engineer, the late Mike Burrows.
The original aluminium TCR blazed a trail, with its compact frame featuring a radically sloping top tube that left much of the bladed aero seatpost visible above it.
In 2000, the TCR gained a threadless headset – an easily overlooked cycling innovation – that shed weight and added front-end stiffness.
The next big leap was the TCR Composite – the first full-carbon TCR, debuting at the 2002 Tour de France, with ONCE’s Joseba Beloki taking second place onboard the bike behind Lance Armstrong.
It’s since been ridden by pro teams such as Sunweb and elite riders including Mark Cavendish and Marianne Vos. The TCR also won our Bike of the Year test in 2018.
Newer models saw disc-brake equipped bikes overtake rim-brake models and electronic gears proliferated.
The newest model features, for the first time, fully internal cable routing and improved aerodynamics. But what goes into making one of the new bikes?
From thread to tarmac
The usual way a modern carbon fibre frame is made sees the brand purchase a selection of pre-preg (pre-impregnated) woven carbon fibre, usually by the roll. This is standard woven carbon fibre cloth that’s pre-impregnated with a resin. When heated (in a carbon enclave oven), it solidifies to create a frame.
The carbon sheets come in different standards, be it lightweight and stiff high-modulus fibres or standard fibres with a little more compliance and weight. Most brands will select sets of mixed sheets to create their carbon frame designs.
Giant's approach is unusual, buying raw threads from Japan – the world leader in carbon-fibre production – then using looms to weave its own material to its own specifications.
This enables Giant’s composite engineers to refine every piece of a frame, balancing weight, stiffness, compliance and strength to a degree rarely found in mass-production bikes. It enables the blending of fibre types you simply can't achieve with off-the-peg carbon rolls.
During our GTM tour, we were allowed into the room where the carbon is woven. A series of weaving machines pull seemingly hundreds of threads of fibre from myriad spools to create sheets of ‘advanced composite’ material.
Giant introduced its woven carbon in the previous-generation TCR, producing the lightest set of pieces for any of its carbon frames to date.
For this update, Giant looked at every element of its process to establish where improvements could be made.
More accurate than lasers
A key improvement was found in moving away from laser cutting for carbon sheets. Laser has always been considered the most accurate way of cutting fibre sheeting into the shapes required.
However, because a laser introduces heat, minuscule areas of the resin are activated. This makes the edges of the sheets less than perfectly flat. These crinkled edges forced Giant to overlap sheets to ensure optimal strength.
Giant's engineers knew if they could remove these imperfect edges, they could decrease weight, maintain strength and make frame production more efficient to boot.
By removing these imperfections, the amount of overlap and, in turn, the number of pieces required to construct a frame could be reduced.
This led to a new cutting method called ‘cold blade cutting’, which enables Giant to reduce the number of pieces needed to create a TCR Advanced SL frame and fork from 380 to 270.
Hands-on approach
Once the pieces are cut into shape, they’re stored in climate-controlled refrigerators within the facility before being hand-laid into moulds by highly skilled technicians.
Nixon Huang, Giant’s road category manager, explains: "Our carbon fibre team are trained for more than six months before they move onto producing our premium framesets."
The lay-up construction rooms all have dust extraction and refrigeration to keep the raw carbon frames clean and the resin at the optimal temperature to ensure the structure is as the engineers intended.
10,000km of testing
After moulding, a selection of frames from each production run is taken to Giant’s test labs to be stress-tested on rigs that simulate 10,000km of use, including pedalling, road impacts, and stress on every element of the frame and fork.
Once the sample frames pass this stage, the other frames and forks are released for finishing.
Every carbon fork Giant produces at the GTM facility is X-rayed to check the internal structure is perfect too.
Nixon claims Giant’s internal quality standards for its lab tests are set to 20 per cent higher than the international standards required of carbon fibre bicycle frames.
Even before a TCR Advanced SL frame is painted and assembled, it has already had more than 11 hours of construction time and more than 50 pairs of hands involved.
Painting, finishing and assembly for Giant’s premium models is all handled at the GTM facility too. Watching the assembly line put together the new TCR are a series of technicians, who specialise in getting each element spot-on.
On a constantly moving computer-controlled system, hoses are threaded, bottom brackets and headsets are greased and installed, and every element of a complete bike is worked on cleanly and efficiently.
At the end of the line, a team of quality-control inspectors checks every bike before they are cleared for packing to head out to Giant's global distribution network.
Advanced production, not mass production
So, what can we take from our time at Giant's GTM facility?
Firstly, carbon fibre frame production isn't your typical mass production. There aren't myriad robotic machines pumping out frames by the thousand. It is still very much a hands-on process, with a relatively simple frame such as the TCR having more than 50 pairs of hands involved in its production. Something such as the downhill Glory Advanced likely gets a heap more.
We all talk about the beautiful artisan quality of a handmade bike. However, perhaps a Giant bearing the Advanced SL moniker is 'more handmade' than a custom steel or titanium bike using off-the-peg tubing.
Remember, Giant is weaving its own carbon in-house and laying up that carbon fibre by hand to exacting standards.
It's good to see the minutiae of detail the Giant engineers are looking at – just to make the smallest of advancements (pun very much intended) to Giant's range-topping bikes. For that alone, the brand should be applauded.
Standing on the shoulders of Giants: the TCR story
The original TCR, or Total Compact Racing, took the idea of MTB-style compact sloping frame geometry and adapted it for the road.
The idea was that a smaller front triangle was both lighter and stiffer than a traditional frame. The back end was also more ‘compact’, which saved weight and made the engineer's job easier to improve power transfer and efficiency.
The early models also had a major advantage in aerodynamics. The much longer seatposts could be aero-shaped and built from carbon fibre, which aided comfort too. Mike Burrows designed a new bladed fork to give front-end aerodynamics a boost.
There’s no getting away from the fact that it was a commercial win too. Road bikes back then had to come in a multitude of sizes, normally around 10 and up to 12. So that’s 12 different tubesets and 12 jigs to weld up.
For the TCR, Giant only had to make three sizes: small, medium and large – adding in different-sized carbon fibre aero seatposts, along with alternative and fully angle-adjustable 105, 120 and 135mm stems.
By 2018, Giant had reverted to five sizes – from XS to XL to fulfill the TCR range.
That original bike was held up in legal wrangling again by the UCI, who said sloping frame designs contravened the rules on bike design. Giant didn’t back down, however, and appealed the decision. By 1997, the all-new TCR was good to go.
For 1998, Giant sponsored the star-studded Spanish Once team – with Frenchman Laurent Jalabert, Switzerland’s Alex Zülle and Belgian Johan Bruyneel among its ranks.
Giant took precautions on the early bike scrutineering after this, with the lightweight anodised bike, as ridden by Jalabert, a concern.
It was always weighed with full bottles in place and rumour has it the team even considered filling the frame with ice cubes before the weigh-in.
Cannondale’s UCI wrangles over bike weight with the Saeco team bikes were well documented around the same time and led to plenty of weight-limit ‘discussions’ with the powers that be.
TCR timeline
- 1997: First production TCR born, with three frame sizes (S, M, L) and angle-adjustable quill stem in three lengths
- 1998: Spanish Team ONCE debuts the TCR at the Tour de France. A Team ONCE replica bike, with a Campagnolo Record groupset, is made for consumers
- 2000: Team ONCE replica bike has 1-inch threadless headset
- 2002: Second-generation, full-composite TCR appears at Tour de France
- 2003: TCR Composite bikes in shops
- 2004: Third-generation TCR debuts at the Tour with the T-Mobile squad. Wins team classification at the Tour 2004-2006
- 2005: Version in five sizes with integrated seatpost (ISP) hits shops
- 2006: Fourth-generation TCR with larger, stiffer rear seatstay debuts with T-Mobile team
- 2008: Fifth-generation TCR Advanced SL hits shops, with press-fit BB and integrated cable routing. Mark Cavendish wins four stages on it at the Tour
- 2009: Team Rabobank rider Denis Menchov wins Giro on TCR Advanced SL
- 2012: Sixth-generation TCR debuts at the Tour with Team Rabobank
- 2015: Seventh-generation TCR debuts at the Tour with Team Giant-Alpecin
- 2016: Eighth-generation, first with integrated disc brakes, in shops
- 2017: Team Sunweb rider Tom Dumoulin wins Giro GC. Team also wins points and mountains classification at Tour de France
- 2018: Rim-braked TCR wins Bike of the Year award
- 2019: Prototype testing of ninth-generation TCR Advanced SL with CCC Team pro racers
- 2022: Team Jayco-AlUla’s Simon Yates rides TCR Advanced SL to victory at Paris-Nice stage race and a mountain stage at Giro
- 2024: The 10th-generation TCR is unveiled
