Cervelo is a very different bike company. Very different. As such, the interaction with them will be different. They are not Trek, Giant or Specialized. That’s good. The “Big 3” are companies that provide a finite set of products within finite categories- but they do not compete with Cervelo. They try, but they don’t. Truth be told, there is more innovation, new thinking and engineering in Cervelo’s least expensive P2SL (read Slowman’s review) as there is in “competeing” brands most expensive carbon fiber show bike.
Think of it this way: Cervelo = Ferrari. That is how their business is built- a racing heritage, engineering background, innovative ideas, form follows function. Many of the other bike companies focus on other areas of their operation such as value priced bikes, relaxed geometry road bikes, mountain bikes, etc.
As someone who has spent a lot of time working on cars, it should be noted that Ferrari makes a very fast car that regularly breaks down, costs a ton of money to fix, is not very well made, and where the name badge costs a ton of money. Ferrari does not pickup trucks for two reasons - 1) it would diminish the cache of their brand and 2) pickup truck owners would never put up with the lack of reliability that regular Ferrari owners do. I am not saying this is Cervelo, but there is a lot more to that analogy than meets the eye…
Beyond that, I also take issue with the idea that no other bike company is doing any innovation. Have you seen the integrated headtube/toptube on the Trek eTTX? The cable routing on the eTTX is also superior to Cervelo’s. Giant is one of the pioneers in carbon manufacturing, and I’d put Trek’s OCLV and Giant’s fabrication processes at the very pinnacle of carbon fiber manufacturing. Mike Burrows, who is one of the most influential designers in the bike industry, was in charge of R&D at Giant for a long time, and if you don’t think he instilled a culture of innovation there, you are very wrong. Cervelo does a great deal of innovating. But what they do better than anyone else is market that innovation. One of my favorite Cervelo features was the little clip they had on innovations of theirs that weighed less than 8g. What I love about Cervelo is that they’ve made engineering cool. And they’ve made it sell. But that doesn’t mean that they are the only ones who are doing it. If you don’t think that a Trek Madone SSL or Giant TCR Team is the same calibre of bike as an R3, you are sorely mistaken.
For the record, I think Cervelo would rather be compared with Porsche - a company where engineering dictates form and design.