In need of an XL gravel bike with 36-inch wheels? Curve Cycling has answered your prayers... but you'll need to fund its production

Please tell me what very limited edition hand made car you can get for £7,500.

While your point is valid re it being an expensive way to test out a new concept/idea, that's a completely normal thing in any industry - early adopters always pay a premium.

Of course not, but to be honest when I see limited edition and handmade it means to me unnecessarily expensive with fancy stickers. I really like mass produced items, anything that can be automated is way better for me.

Let's face it even the super expensive Ti frames at Moots, they require a half manhour of expert cranfmanship (the welds) with the rest being easy to made by easy to train personnel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvqo9Ino1lE . So the rest is of course smart design, but marketing mostly increases price.

There are many tall guys, so if a Decathlon GRVL 120 is sold for £600, I believe it would be reasonable to sell 3 big sizes for a 36 inch bike with similar specs (much higher than my bike, which in turn seem much higher than the 90s mtb I first rode) at £1000 with the only differences being the frame, fork, big hoops and long spokes.

@Rendel Harris agree totally, but when I lock my bike outside with my cromo highly praised D-Lock, I know that it is 60 seconds, a battery angle grinder, and some bored bypassers away, so I would never invest too much in my commuter.

cyclisto wrote:

There are many tall guys, so if a Decathlon GRVL 120 is sold for £600, I believe it would be reasonable to sell 3 big sizes for a 36 inch bike with similar specs (much higher than my bike, which in turn seem much higher than the 90s mtb I first rode) at £1000 with the only differences being the frame, fork, big hoops and long spokes.

Decathlon - massive company, that can use ecomonomies of scale to leverage the outsourcing of the mass production of frames in factories already mass producing grames, and of a bike with reasonably settled/established geometry (i.e. little R&D).

Curve - tiny company (by comparison), who in this case have designed a whole new frame geometry from scratch, and who are, at this stage anyway, in no position to make any frames without reasonable prior commitment, never mind thinking about or stumping up the considerable budget that would be required to establish any form of mass production.

Please consider comparing apples with apples, instead of your example of an apple and an orange.

Of course, Curve is low volume, but if Decathlon built this bike with its economies of scale would cost like £700, £1000 is for a manufacturer willing to do it in a somehow big scale but bigger than the 20 pieces series, like the fatbikes scales where good deals exist https://www.konaworld.com/collections/fat-fifty.

joules1975 wrote:

cyclisto wrote:

There are many tall guys, so if a Decathlon GRVL 120 is sold for £600, I believe it would be reasonable to sell 3 big sizes for a 36 inch bike with similar specs (much higher than my bike, which in turn seem much higher than the 90s mtb I first rode) at £1000 with the only differences being the frame, fork, big hoops and long spokes.

Decathlon - massive company, that can use ecomonomies of scale to leverage the outsourcing of the mass production of frames in factories already mass producing grames, and of a bike with reasonably settled/established geometry (i.e. little R&D).

Curve - tiny company (by comparison), who in this case have designed a whole new frame geometry from scratch, and who are, at this stage anyway, in no position to make any frames without reasonable prior commitment, never mind thinking about or stumping up the considerable budget that would be required to establish any form of mass production.

Please consider comparing apples with apples, instead of your example of an apple and an orange.

An orange 5, and an apple iPhone 5 - definitely different things

cyclisto wrote:

I would be interested though in trying a 36 inch bike. In order to be a potential buyer, I would prefer a price that suits more to a bicycle and less to a car.

It's a lot of money but it is unique product and will at least initially be in a very small edition and so justifies its pricetag much more than some cookie-cutter mass-produced offerings from the major manufacturers. Also, I'm not in the business of defending the high prices now required to buy new top-end bicycles and I wouldn't pay them myself, but at a conservative estimate cycling instead of using a car or public transport saves me about £3500 a year (yearly Zone 1&2 Travelcard £1700, weekly train trip to see family £500 extra per year, car insurance when we got rid of it in 2021 £500 per year, maintenance £250 per year, fuel £500 per year, parking permit £150 per year et cetera et cetera…) so in that context £7500 doesn't take a very long time to recoup.