Pinkbike Poll: Should Mountain Bike Companies Consider Ditching Model Years?

Mountain bikes aren't going to get any cheaper. That's not how the world works. If you don't believe me, look at car prices. When it was released in 1961 a Jaguar E-Type would have cost you £2,098. Its modern equivalent is the F-Type, and the entry level version will set you back a cool £58,000. Yes, you can argue that you get a lot more car today, but the plain truth is that inflation is one of the constants of the modern world. And this means that things are only going to cost more in the future. Raw material prices are going to keep rising, fuel prices are going to keep rising (those bikes have to be transported from you to the factory) and the wages for the people who make the bikes are going to have to rise so they too can afford to keep up with that inflation. If you look at the historical pricing of virtually any commodity or service in our world, you will see this trend.

Taking this as given, the question we would hope bike companies are asking themselves is: "How can we make our customers feel more comfortable with what we are asking them to pay for our bikes?" I have a suggestion - how about ditching model years?


Twenty years ago mountain bikes were relatively simple creatures, and their price tags were relatively modest to reflect this. In the intervening years they have evolved exponentially and there is a strong argument that today's bikes, while they are undoubtedly more expensive, offer much more value than their simpler predecessors. They last longer, weigh a lot less and allow you to do a lot more. Yet where once a top-end bike might have been $2,000, today they can be $10,000 (let's not get into the inflationary maths here about the relative values). While not everyone will be comfortable accepting a $2,000 bike going out of date within twelve months of buying it, it's a different matter to having that happen to one costing something like five times as much.

Going back to the analogy of the auto industry - they tend to work on a seven-year life cycle for cars. While your car is current, the re-sale value remains good and people can work that into part of the sums to justify buying the car. Maybe seven years is too long for a bicycle, if for no other reason than because the development rate has been much more rapid. Today, most people wouldn't choose to ride a seven year old bike because the current generation of bikes are so much better, where a seven year old car is still fairly current. But what about three years? If we're honest, those bikes from twenty years ago may not have survived this long, but today, if you buy a bicycle from one of the major manufacturers, it's a fairly safe bet that if you look after it, it will still be running nicely.


It is worth noting that some companies have already stepped away from at least some of the yearly cycle. Shimano tend to keep their groupsets consistent for multiple years, SRAM seem to have followed suit in recent years. Many smaller brands already do this - one of the reason Santa Cruz owners often say they like buying from the brand is that their bikes don't go out of date so quickly, and that they hold their resale value well. Expecting the whole industry to line up with each other for their release schedules is never going to happen for a myriad of reasons. It also makes sense that manufacturers are naturally going to want to update the component specs if something new comes along that they feel will offer riders a better experience on the bike, what we are talking about here would be keeping a frame design (and its colour scheme) consistent. Maybe this would help people feel they are getting better value for the price they are paying for their new bicycle.

So with bike prices set to rise further in the coming years, do you think it's time bicycle manufacturers took a long hard look at model years?

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