Saturation
In terms of your saturation comment… people just aren’t selling them at that price. You can have extreme saturation of HED3’s, but unless somebody is willing to SELL that wheel at a low price, they’re just going to stay high. The intrinsic value stays up; not to mention that people dont’ tend to want to lose a ton of money on wheels that they paid hundreds for, even if it is 10 years old.
It also speaks to the quality of the wheel; it’s basically bombproof, super aero, and awesome. It’s basically the perfect wheel, sans for its weight. For many, that weight is negligable. Hell, I’d put some on my road bike if I had some. At this point I’m riding a 50/88 setup, so I doubt it’ll happen soon, but I ALWAYS jump at the rare 400 dollar set that goes on here or eBay when I get the chance. Always. Because they’re worth it at that price, IMO.
Anyway,
The wheels you listed
- Not aero
- Heavy
But in terms of the overall idea, we already HAVE those 20 dollar cardboard bicycles that are absolutely amazing. And work. But it would just ruin the market to sell them here, hence, we don’t have them. The wheels themselves aren’t that expensive, but you are working in a niche market that doesn’t sell “that many” of each set. So they have to
- Pay people who build these things
- Pay engineers
- Pay marketing
- Pay for the building and equipment
- Pay a whole bunch more stuff
And if you want to talk performance, you really can go chinese carbon in terms of wheels and be absolutely fine; the quality control and carbon used is on par with the big name brands; only issue is possibly build (possibly), and the long turn-around time if your wheels break under warranty, which is super rare. But of course, you have a ton of nay-sayers who don’t have first hand experience who just hate non-branded things because it’s the internet and self justification/verification of a super pricy product. But that’s getting off topic.
In terms of aero, regardless of what brand that wheel is, you’re talking single digit wattage savings when comparing wheels of similar depth, most of the time. MOST. For many people, it isn’t worth spending a grand when you can get, literally, 90+% of that for half the price. The rest is in branding and, again, we’re human. For some of us, it’s worth it to have ZIPP or ENVE or whatever on the side of that rim. It matters. You couldn’t get half the people riding them to give you numerical quantification of the benefits those wheels have over something cheaper. The data is out there but how many people are reading?
Lastly, it isn’t always about making the cheapest and best thing, sometimes you have to sit back and see the “big picture.”
I mean, as an example, we can replace, literally, ALL fast food workers with robots and you’d never have an improper order and food would always be hot and quick, but it would ruin this country. That’s why we still have people working at McDonalds who can’t make a hamburger with no cheese and no pickle. We can’t just throw people to the streets.
So… yea.