What Is a Bike Worth?

Anyone who remembers the ‘80s will have the sense that bikes cost a hell of a lot more than they used to, though someone smart once said that comparison is the theft of joy. Since the ‘80s, the way bikes get made, where they get made, and what they get made out of have changed completely. It’s apples and cantaloupes really, and you could argue that the old way was better, but I’m not going to do that, because we don’t have time machines yet, and today’s bikes are two generations (at least) better than they were then.

First, let’s talk about kids’ bikes. I was talking to a bike shop owner once, and he gave me his pitch when parents baulk at paying more than $500 for a bicycle for their child. Today, you can get an XBox Series X console with 1TB of storage and 24 months of XBox Game Pass Ultimate. That’s $900, and you’ll want a headset and some upgraded controllers, which brings you into the $1400 range. There will certainly be something better on the market in two years. 

So the bike shop owner would say something like, “You’ll pay north of $500 for your kid to sit inside and twiddle their thumbs while their attention deficit gets worse and worse, but giving them a way to get outside, get some exercise and expand their minds isn’t worth that much?” He put it a bit friendlier than that, but I think you can see it’s a pretty watertight argument.

There’s a common cyclist joke about how their bike is worth more than their car. But what did cars cost in the ’80s? And what does that tell us about how much bikes cost now?

In 1985, a 4WD Toyota Tacoma, brand new, drive it off the lot, cost $9500. An equivalent Toyota Tacoma today has an MSRP right around $40,000, so roughly 4 times what it cost back in the day.

An Ibis Ripley, the main mountain bike I ride, with Shimano SLX drivetrain is $5600. If you divided that by four, to get the ‘80s price equivalent, it’d be $1400, which would have been among the pricier bikes at the time for sure, but it might be fair to say the number of parts and complexity of technology in that bike account for the difference.

Maybe we should consider a bike like the Specialized Sirrus X 2.0, which is a “fitness hybrid,” but in the middle ’80s would have been an absolutely killer mountain bike. It retails for $775, which converts to about $195 if we divide by four as above. That’s cheap. That’s a good value.

Maybe I’ve accidentally cherry-picked examples, but what I really think is happening is that our sense of what things cost is too narrow. We think of prices in absolute terms, rather than viewing them relative to incomes. A product’s value, at any given time, is really a function of what it costs relative to the average income of the buying public, so the differential may seem big. This thing costs FOUR TIMES what it used to, but if the market is also earning 3-5 times what they were in say 1985, then the increase isn’t really that shocking.

I’d also wager our bikes are worth more to us than almost any of our other possessions, which means, I hate to say it, they might just have us over the proverbial barrel.