Giant has the new tt bike listed under its frames but no pics or specs and someone posted pics of the new cervelos but nothing new on there website yet
For one, Specialized cheapened up some of the components. I was in the market and compared the '09 and '10 models. The '09 bikes (at least the Pro) have better aero bars, chains, and few other things. It was the cockpit set up that swayed me to the '09s even though pricewise there wasn’t a huge difference at the time.
EDIT: Dooh… just noticed you said frameset. No idea why just the frameset would drop like that. Maybe just the normal lowering mfg costs and market pressure.
Ammortization of the costs of the mold. Now that they’ve probably paid for the molds several times over…they can produce the bikes cheaper…although the margins are probably higher at the same time.
Just a guess…but that’s how manufacturing often works. Thats why you pay so damn much for new stuff. They have to make the $ on it to recoup development costs. You want to do that as quickly as possible…so that then you can still make REAL $ while the item is still reasonably popular.
I remember not too long ago bike shops were saying the same framesets would go up 30-40% because of oil and the weak dollar. Interesting that in this case it has gone down almost 20%
I wonder why the transition frameset has gone down $400. That doesn’t make much sense to me.
The Transition line actually got more investment in 2010. We’ve made three new sizes of the bike (an XS 700c bike, a taller XL, and a new XXL that’s longer and taller). There are now 6 full sizes of the carbon Transition and a full size run of an alloy Transition at $1450. The alloy bike is a 10-spd bike with the same frame as our S-Works from three years ago with a bit better cable routing.
The price drops across the line are for two reasons:
We were a bit on the high side of costing last year and have noted that. Our new prices reflect huge price drops, even while maintaining similar component specs to last year.
A quick anecdote – in deciding which Ironman race that Brendan O’Brien (another Specialized Engineer) and myself would race for our first Iron distance triathlon, we chose the one with a good reputation that wouldn’t break the bank – Vineman at $260. We know the economy isn’t perfect right now, a lot of us have taken financial hits this year – many have lost jobs. But we still race despite the financial woes. We wanted to make sure that for 2010, the Transition is a great value proposition no matter your bike budget. So, in general, spec stays the same and price drops a bunch – even on the frameset.
Hmmm, Im still not really sure what I think of the new colour schemes overall of Cervelo. But the P4 is definitely better… Shame that it doesn’t match the looks of my wallet.
