How Much Do You Actually Need To Spend To Get A Good Bike? | GCN Tech Show Ep. 182

welcome to the gcn tech show coming up this week we've got a puncture proof inner tube aero kit for fast riders a bike light tracker combo shiny tubeless valves and a new bike for boris johnson and we're gonna discuss what is the optimum price to pay for a bike which price point represents the best bang for your buck we'll begin with our poll results from last week in which we asked you is the uci right to ban continuous glucose monitor sensors being used in races and well it was quite clear overwhelmingly 65 percent of you said no by this precedent um it's a slippery slope and all sensors should be banned and um just 35 percent of you said yes i don't want taking over the sport i thought it'd be closer than that yeah it seems people um welcome the tech which i think i think is good i agree i think it's all good but this week we're discussing what is the optimum amount of money to spend on an entry-level bike so which gives you the biggest bang for your buck so the other day i was reading an article on a posh newspaper or the independent um well the online version anyway but the article i saw was saying about what is the optimum amount of money to spend on a bottle of wine so what gives you sort of best wine without breaking the bank and it's something that everyone can kind of afford and it turns out ten pound is that man okay well aside from the fact that i'm amazed that you described the independent as posh yes what is well how does that work why is ten pounds the optimum amount so you've obviously got some fixed costs included with bottled wine so things like the tax the glass bottle itself packaging transport marketing and then after all of those costs is the amount that's left to go on to the actual wine so if the example that was given in this article was five pounds so if you spent five pounds on your bottle of wine all that's left is 49 pence to go into your wine so having five pounds there's only actually a small proportion of it that's going on to your white whereas if you spent 10 pounds on your bottle of wine you're effectively spending more money going on the quality of the wine itself so if you're spending twice the amount of money over your five pound bottle you're getting six times the amount of money spent on the wine the actual wine itself yeah right so i guess we can apply this to bikes we can apply this to bikes and it'd be interesting to see what like our fixed costs are and how much money is left to be spent onto the quality of the bike so i guess the thing to point out is that you can increase the amount of money spent on a bottle of wine so you could have a thousand pound yeah a bottle of wine yeah i'm sure they exist yeah yeah they took yeah not in probably in hank's wine cellar yes but a thousand pound bottle of wine it it although it might be better than a ten pound bottle of wine the the sort of it's not proportionately better no so it might be just a bit better it's like diminishing returns the more you spend it's not a thousand times better in terms of our bikes though like how cheap is too cheap because i saw this and wondered what it was going to be like yes this is a bike from halfords it's very entry level this bike is 135 pounds so very sort of competitively priced at an entry level market but we can make some assumptions about the cost to the buy first up in the uk um there's value added tax added on to a purchase like this similar taxes applied to in other countries as well and that would be 20 here which is 27 pounds then you've got the retailer markup again this will vary but we can make an assumption of it being around sort of 25 so those are some of our first a sort of fixed cost though aren't they so out of our original 135 pound bike we're down to about 81 pounds now taken into those but we haven't taken into consideration lots of the other aspects so we've got things like the packaging the transport the marketing and even the manufacturer they've got to make a profit as well so if we take into account a lot of those additional costs we're probably close to having a value of about 50 pounds from our original 135 pounds and i guess that's kind of reflected in the quality of some of the components and just even the weight of it even as well yeah a bike at this price is going to be well noticeably heavy as soon as you as soon as you pick it up but the key thing for me is is the quality of these sort of low end components while they do work um they don't work noticeably anywhere near as well as slightly more expensive ones and also in our well considerable experience in riding lots of different bikes for many years these components don't tend to last anywhere near as long as ones that are a little bit more so we're going to replace them sooner than yellow yeah it's that kind of adage of you buy cheap you buy twice yeah so for someone looking to buy their first bike or get the best bang for their buck how much do they need to spend to get that good quality without having to spend thousands and thousands of pounds euros or dollars yeah i think a key thing to point out first is the business model of the bike brand can vary and that can have quite a significant impact on it so direct sales model companies such as well decathlon uh ribble and albaya do it and canyon do it as well they cut out a large amount of the cost in terms of distribution cost and you know retailer cost and that saving can be passed on to the customer so that can represent sort of bigger bang for your buck so straight off the bat what i'm going to say is around 750 pounds up to around 1500 pounds i think that's a good sort of marker point i know it's quite a wide price range yeah but i think you start to get into the realms of some really good quality bikes for you yeah i'd agree so if we take your 750 pound 1500 pound price point and go just below that to kind of justify it show you what you can get this bike from decathlon would be a really good example it's under 500 pounds and represents a considerable step up in performance and quality of components over the really basic bike we showed first um it would be a much better purchase if your your budget allowed for it yeah i mean this has got like a microchip group set and gears on it which is fine but it isn't quite as good as even the entry-level shimano stuff so like a sora for example it's a bit heavier the reliability is maybe not quite so good but there's nothing actually wrong with it but it just highlights that if you do spend that little bit of extra money like we're sort of saying 750 pounds up to our 1500 pound marker you can get a bike that's considerably better in quality can you yes the components are going to go up a considerable level just going that little bit more so we can increase it further from our 500 pound example there's still better quality and sort of bang for your buck to come yeah what this is sticking with your wine analogy it's kind of like that two quid bottle of wine we've now gone up to kind of like a six quid bottle of wine and a six-foot bottle of wine can be really enjoyable yeah really good but we want to spend a little bit more because we think we can get quite a bit of improvement in terms of performance and quality yes so moving into that 750 1500 pound price point you're starting to look at a bike that's going to have a really good quality sort of aluminium frame and on some cases carbon frames too but i would argue that for 90 of road cyclists like a really good aluminium frame is kind of all you need you know a top-end carbon frame like something that you know the top guys that tour de france would ride that can cost thousands and thousands easily four times as much as a good aluminium frame but it's not going to be four times better yes it's not four times lighter and it's not it's not going to make you four times faster yeah um which is stiffer it is lighter yeah diminishing returns are you yeah it's always going to get better but in terms of proportionately not in the same way as the cost and the same can be said for group sets shimano jura ace the top top end top tier group set it's amazing it is phenomenally good but and it is better than ultegra it's lighter yeah ultegra which is the tier below but you know we've tried them back in fact the shifting quality is pretty much the same or even when you go to 105 for example groups out of people you're getting that really good price point and that's why it earned its title of group set of people yeah dura ace does not shift two times better than altegra and it is not half the weight it is lighter yeah but carbon bikes feel amazing though don't they yeah and if you take the logic of well if you can ride a grand fondue on it then it'll be fine that's all right but if you're going to be racing at a higher level for example then you probably are going to want to consider a carbon fiber lightweight aerodynamic bike because when you're racing that could be the difference and it could be the difference between winning or losing yes yeah i know i see what you're saying yeah and but it's it's a bit like you know myself and uh and you when it comes to wine with philistines yes so the difference between a kind of 10 pound bottle of wine and a sort of 500 pound bottle of wine we're not really going to be able to appreciate it we're not going to tell the difference we're not some elite no um but it's that thing of yeah i think for most cyclists again that that that price that 750 1500 represents that kind of sweet spot yeah and you know and it's for that price you can expect to get a really good quality frame because it's likely aluminium could be carbon or aluminum could be carbon yeah yeah um a carbon fork as well you should expect and then i i think we agreed on this the sweet spot is 105 yeah the optimum group set for price and performance but the weight difference is of a sort of real top-end carbon frame and a mid-range one can sometimes only be around 300 grams yeah which isn't much at all and if you actually do some maths on this and you say put that into um you know calculator and look at what that means on a climb that 300 gram difference on a 10 kilometer alpine climb with an average gradient of six percent is worth around two watts difference it's not how much you know as cyclists we do place far too much emphasis in our in our minds on weight if you then start to look at you know what the total uh system mass difference would be so obviously it's not just a frame weight it's a really expensive bike um all your components yeah all the components combined you start to look at say how much difference a kilo to a kilo and a half of added weight can be which is typically the difference between a bike that costs 1500 pounds and a bike that costs 500 pounds it's probably a kilo kilo and a half then on that same 10 kilometer climb you're looking a time difference of around 30 seconds slower so that is really or that best bang for your buck point isn't it because you're getting a big improvement in time though yeah but you know for relative to what you've spent yeah so like we say the weight and the climbing ability of a bike may or may not be important to you but what we can all agree on is that 105 is definitely the group set of people yeah we should get that made into a t-shirt you've already got it for the list yeah yeah we've got resistances and um what was there one group set of people oh yeah right anyway uh we're gonna have a poll we would like to know what you think is the optimum price to spend on a bike um or a new bike uh is it you know around 500 pounds euros of dollars a thousand pounds euros a dollars 2 head over to the gcn app or click on the link down below to vote it's now time for hot tech and first up this week map clothing have launched a new range which uses all the off cuts from their existing range to create new and exciting jerseys shorts whatever else they want to sell so they're going to use a leftover material to create a funky new jersey which is kind of a bit like a patchwork quilt idea really all right yeah it's nice for the environment it's good for the environment so it's a more sustainable clothing range and maps say they took their inspiration from this from 1980s shoe salesman who would go around with one shoe which was made of loads of different materials and loads of different colors so that's what's inspired well sticking with cycling clothing a new company called go faster has launched a range of cycling clothing on kickstarter that you're only allowed to buy if you can prove you're fast enough yeah so you have to upload a ride onto strava to unlock the different levels of jerseys that they were planning on making so the first level i think was about 26 kilometers an hour you have to upload it has to be a ride of a minimum of 10 kilometers yeah so then you've got level one jersey and then they were proposing the level two jersey which had an average speed requirement i think was like 39 kilometers an hour yeah yeah so that's it's quite fast for average rider isn't it mm-hmm yeah well the the result of this was well i mean i wouldn't see it's quite a novel idea yeah they're trying to encourage they've got their stick for those yeah try to encourage people to try and best themselves and get fitter and faster but yes they've there's been a bit of a backlash yeah so since then they've pulled the campaign off of kickstarter and say they're going to reassess their business model i think it's quite cool well i think that's wise because they i mean they're limiting their potential considerably by saying you have to be able to ride yeah where does it end well i guess that is a very valid point we wouldn't be able to buy those those second jerseys i'd be stuck on level zero oh god yeah next up we've got the vodafone curve bike light tracker so this is an anti-theft device but it's also a smart rear light so it's got all of your usual features you'd expect from a rear light so it's rechargeable it's got three different modes 40 lumens of output but then in addition to that the part that is attached to the bikes or the brackets or area is what houses the tracker and the gps part of it so you can actually remove part of the rear light to put it into tracking mode so if you were to leave your bike outside a cafe for example and then can act as a security device because if your bike moves you'll get an alert on your phone and then also it'll sound a really loud siren yeah 107 decibels that's loud isn't it loud thing um it also has a little sim card slot in and that's how the sort of tracking works with the vodafone network coverage and you do have to pay i think three pounds a month yeah to keep that aspect active i think you need to have that so because it's gps enabled it will also actually record some of your ride metrics so when you're riding around and record your location where you've been sort of distance speed some basic stuff you can't really come you know pair this up to a power meter for example yeah well um anti-theft devices always welcome on our watch yes [Music] we have some seriously exciting hot tech now we were filming yesterday and while we're filming i noticed a detail on alex's bike he had some fancy valves installed tell us more these are the mock-off v2 valves which as you can probably imagine stands for version 2. so these are upgraded so they're lighter than the previous one so these are made from 7075 aluminium as opposed to 606 one which the old ones were for so lighter they come in 10 super cool colors i've got the oil slick ones i know i'm glad you noticed those actually and the big addition to these is that the inside edge of the valve has got little slots machined into it so that it can work with like a tie liner for example like those vitoria run flats um so it's pretty cool yeah come with like nice little metal valve caps help remove the valve core so they're just quite cool little accessories for the details isn't it it's all about the details up next we've got a brand new honda gx motor so this is the gxe do you know what that is no um okay lots of people might not know so the honda gx motor is a small petrol engine which is used in lots of sort of small machinery like portable tools generators and things like that and potentially yeah it's that sort of size and motor but what's cool is that honda are now making an electric version of this so i know it's not designed for our bikes for example but it does show is a huge company like honda are investing into small portable motors and batteries which means in the future maybe we could see honda e-bikes yeah well it's good that this sort of you know a company they're standing in their experience and their engineering knowledge is pushing small electronic motors yeah i mean these things are quite small so this this sort of size and they're like 2 000 watts of power 2001 imagine that on your bike next up president joe biden as gifted prime minister boris johnson a bike custom bike a custom bike and a custom painted helmet that is cool that's a nice gift this is at the g7 summit which is currently taking place down in cornwall um and the bike well i've got a picture of it here it's been made by a small american firm it's got a union flag painted on the on the down tube and the united states flag on there on the top tube nice brook saddle on there rim brake as well as rim brake well it's rim brake but they're cantilever cantilever room brakes yeah it's also got sram um etap one by on there a bit disappointed see in the photo it's biggie big oh yeah but it's but it's it's a sort of hut it's a hybrid affair it's not bible worthy morris apparently likes it he's already been seen riding it um which i'm not surprised by it's a very nice bike i think we should uh do a hot or not oh yeah boris johnson's new bike from joe biden is it hot or is it not um yeah i mean i like it i think it's cool i think that's a cool bite nice find a bit of hot tech this week is a brand new puncture proof inner tube from chubalito i know i promised this at the start of the show so let's tell you a little bit more about it so they say it's impossible to puncture this in a tube and they're so confident so that they're going to offer users a one-year warranty against punctures one year warranty so yeah but it costs how much um 29.99 29.99 so i guess it's up to you whether you decide you want puncture proof inner tubes and pay quite a lot for them or you just for this for less money by five yeah normal yeah if it's really cold outside you don't want the inconvenience of a puncture do you well one in a tube is better for the environment yeah lots of lots of rubber and also these are even though they're puncture proof so they're presumably a bit thicker than some of the light weight in the tubes they are still reasonably reasonably lightweight cool so they're 130 grams they come in pressed up schrader valves lots of different widths i think it's 30 mil up to about 50 ml these are um all you have to do is just register your inner tube at least one month after you've bought it no within one month sorry not at least and then they'll offer you a warranty for you i guess if you don't like tubeless this could be the solution for you i love tubeless more hot tech next week we know yeah time now for screw riding upgrades buy upgrades where you submit upgrades that you've made to your bike's equipment or cycling live so the chance to win the ultimate prize gcn wars bottle or bead on if you're french um and we're going to begin with last week's upgrades you submit your upgrades using the gta app yes last week last week had pete warburton's retro rally grand sports up against bny underscore cycles retro modern bataan beauty it was close it was close very close 49 went to the battalion beauty which means the winner is pete warburton's retro rally grand sport get in touch over on facebook and we'll arrange the water bottle to be sent out to you yeah well done pete warburton um this week we've got a submission from oscar astros who says that well his girlfriend um has been getting into cycling which is good and she was riding a sort of basic what he described as hardware store bike and she felt like she needed an upgrade so uh he got a ridley x right good good crossbite yeah from 2015 but he was it was it seemed better days he's in a rough state so he set about sorting it out he's resprayed it he's put new decals on it or decals um and he's also put a few new components on it as well 105 shifters diore calipers and he's gone one by on it tiagra cranks and a 40 tooth grx chainring nice good upgrade yeah good upgrade dig it so you spend less than 300 pounds yeah and well for less than 300 pounds spent that is a phenomenal the color is cool isn't it upgrading yeah i do kind of yeah i like that color that's a that's a nice a nice color it's really good it is a good upgrade i like the paint finish i like the wheels oh yeah it didn't say that there's a lot of stock wheels that have come with it oh it's done well that's it that is quite an upgrade but as you say every single week is not going to be plain sailing so they're up against cacterium i'm glad you said the username because i would have no idea how to pronounce that um so they say they got into watching gcn a year ago and decided to build their own bar bike so the basis of this was their father's trekking bike which i had about 30 years ago drive train was done so it's converted it all to shimano a bit of a mix of shrine micro shift sun race one by 11 flare drop bars cx tyres um weighs around 12 kilograms he says so this is a mountain bike gravel bike conversion we get loads of these selling don't yeah that's um that's that's a cracking looking bike though yeah it's just oh i mean that is yeah for doing that kind of mixed surface riding yeah that's just that's just i do love seeing these like mountain bike gravel bike conversions because they're so popular aren't they yeah we should probably do some can we should to our own one imagine how cool that would be i have a race well that's an idea but anyway um we need to get a decider on this for next week yeah um so head over to the gcn app click hold on link back click on the link down below to vote even and we'll announce the winner next week it's now time for the bike vault where you upload pictures of your bikes into the gcn app and ollie and i judge them to be either nice or super nice and if they're super nice i ring the bell and commit them to the bike vault for a tennessee yeah uh you can play along at home voting on all the bikes that we feature and submit your own using the gcn app first of this week we've got rh radek yes i think that's his name i submitted a ventum ns1 what do you think of that it's very american with those wheels on very american um sram ready tap oversized pulley wheels yeah do you know i'm gonna go super nice on that one yeah i think straight in really tight super nice lined up uh next up we have two bingo yes what have they got he's got a dusty uh dusty gravel bike focus stud focus yes what do you make of that um crank's not aligned but it is biggie smalls um can't see the valves i tell you what in that part of the world they love piles of wood yes and this picture just shows that this does confirm that um that view what what are you saying um i quite like it it's quite hard to see some of some of the bike but yeah ah crank's not a line and we we like to be picky on something it's nice yeah it's nice next up we've got zest yeah with a with a with a voodoo magic 10. what do you make of that oh um i mean it doesn't have a saddle for starters nice yeah okay yeah nice moving on uh d alvarez 305 has submitted the dodge ram dodge well they clearly want us to know that they have a dodge ram pickup truck yes i think that's what we can tell from this photo okay um what tell us about the dodge ram though what's the sort of specs of it quite impressive pickup trucks to be honest i mean they're sort of king of the road i mean it's a 6.2 litre supercharged v8 engine over 700 brake horsepower punchy as well i mean in spite of being such a big vehicle they can you can launch your north 60 in like four and a half seconds what sort of mpgs can you expect from that three oh fantastic just yeah there you go well dodge ram pickup trucks nice pickup truck if you're into that sort of thing yeah um up next what we've got we've got seven axiom steel from uh who's this from uh la lucic oh there we go yeah oh i like this quite a sort of it's custom isn't it it is custom because look at the size of the head tube i'm giving that a super nice for the fact that it's got a nice matching blue speedplay pedal it's got a nice campagnolo group set on it and that frame pump that is incredible incredible background it's a super nice super super nice [Music] um next up who have we got mechanic dan who says steel is real with his dee bernardi sl dave bernardi you'd probably know what you say um anyway god that's a cool bike this is isn't it yes that is like a distinctive it's very much a sort of retro modern combo isn't it i like the way he's combined all sorts of different components on there he's got srams or sun tour uh black ink chain ring on there all sorts of it's going to look pedals oh yeah super nice super nice whoa that's unfortunate for the bike vault why does it end so quick every single week i know yeah yeah what a shame it also means it's the end of the gcn tech show um i guess we'll be back next week if you like this video give it a big thumbs up let us know in the comments section if you enjoyed the show and see the same time next week yeah oh be sure to check out some of our latest documentaries on gtm plus we've got some cracking ones including your new game changers documentary that's dropped so check it out

Channel: GCN Tech

Views: 594,664

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Id: lrn70L25Mfg

Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021