Today’s top-end racing bicycles are very, very good. Bikes from major manufacturers hit their marks one after the other: light, stiff, aerodynamically optimized, reliable and more. They represent the pinnacle of what each company thinks a bike should entail. Carbon fiber is a fantastic material for building bicycles, and as manufacturers get better at using it, bicycles continue to improve.
In addition to being very good, however, production bicycles from big, mainstream brands have gotten rather expensive of late. For example: from 2018 to 2023, Specialized’s flagship road bike, the S-Works Tarmac, increased in price from $10,000 to $14,250.
