How can a road bike cost as much as a motorbike?

The rising cost of bikes is hard to ignore. If you are in the market for a new road bike, you will know just how much they can cost these days. The current breed of superbikes can set you back just as much as a brand new motorbike.

But how and why is this the case? After all, a road bike has very few parts when compared to a motorbike and, most obviously, no engine.

GCN's Alex Paton and Manon Lloyd have gone looking for answers.

Can it be a market of scale issue?

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We have now reached a point where a road bike can set you back the same money as a motorbike

It's widely accepted that the larger the scale on which something is produced, the cheaper it can be done. Machinery, bulk buying raw materials, and refined manufacturing processes all contribute to driving the cost of the finished product down.

In 2022, 143 million bikes were sold globally. That's nearly three times the amount of motorbikes that were sold over the same period. On the surface, this does the opposite of justifying the cost of bikes.

However, when you scratch beneath the surface you find that the overwhelming majority of bike sales are of lower-end bikes used by people all over the world for transport and leisure. The volume of high-end road bikes made from carbon fibre and designed in wind tunnels only makes up a very small proportion of the total sales.

• Read more: GCN Tech Show: Is the cost of cycling killing the sport?

Technological progression costs

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The latest bread of hyper bikes are barely recognisable when compared to bikes 20 years ago with technological advancements leaping forward year after year

A motorbike has a lot more going on than a road bike, that is for sure. One of the big costs for road bikes is that they have come on in leaps and bounds in a relatively short period. It is only in the late 2000’s that aero bikes became a thing and the same can be said for the widespread uptake of carbon fibre.

Designing, testing, and refining these new products takes a considerable amount of research and development, which all costs money.

Motorbikes, on the other hand, have reached something of a plateau in terms of big step changes in development. A motorbike made in 2023 is going to be very similar to one made in 2003. Although cosmetically things will change, a lot of the underpinnings of the motorbike will either be the same, similar, or have seen a steady refinement over the years.

• Read more: What is fusion fibre and is it the future of bike component manufacture?

Ready to race straight from the box

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It is possible to buy a Tour de France winning race bike straight from the manufacturer. The same cannot be said for a motoGP bike

One of the beautiful things about our sport is the ability to ride on the same roads as the pros and – if you have the desire – the same kit. With deep enough pockets, you can buy the exact bikes that the best riders in the world use at races like the Tour de France. Although they may be eye wateringly expensive, the fact that you can ride exactly what the best in the world do is not something that can be said about motorbikes.

If you take the very best stock motorbikes built for track days and racing, these are going to put the price up towards the £/$/€30,000 mark. However, this is still a step below the bikes used by the professional riders. A MotoGP bike is a bespoke bit of kit, not something that you can just go and buy, and even if you could they have a price tag well north of £/$/€1.5 million.

• Read more: Best men's WorldTour bikes of 2023: Which brand won the most races?

Road bikes have way more spec choices

If you are looking to buy a brand new motorbike from a dealer, you will have a handful of brands to choose from, a few styles of bike, and then a couple of different engine sizes. The reality is the level of choice you have over the finished product is relatively small. This is a great way to keep costs down as you only need to be able to manufacture one product over and over again.

This is flipped on its head in the cycling world, with brands offering multiple different build kits and different frames to accommodate every type of budget, rider, and preference. Some bike brands have over 10 different sizes for the same bike and can even make the same bike out of different materials.

This diversification costs money throughout the whole process. The design process has to be carried out for each size and material as too does the testing of them. As far as the manufacturer is concerned having the right jigs, moulds, presses, and tooling for each model and size all cost additional money.

• Read more: Tour de France bikes ranked – cheapest to most expensive

Profit margins

Genuine profit margins for any industry can be hard to come by. Most industries like to keep this a closely guarded secret for obvious reasons. We have managed to get some general statistics on both the motorbike and cycling industries to compare just how much of the total sale price of the bikes is profit.

On average, a brand new motorcycle provides the dealership with around a 10% profit margin. For road bikes, this margin grows to around 40%. This seems like a very high percentage of profit. However, as mentioned above, the technological advances in bike design do cost a lot and that cost needs to be recuperated. Also, the number of top-spec carbon fibre road bikes being sold is relatively small meaning that the associated research and development costs need to be reclaimed over a smaller number of sales than for motorcycles.

No matter how you choose to look at it, the cost of the highest-end premium road bikes is getting out of hand. Not long ago bikes costing £/$/€10,000 we deemed to be hyperbikes and now for some brands they aren’t even the top tier offering.

Ultimately as consumers, we have the ability to vote with our money on what we are willing to buy and how much we are willing to pay for it. Although the rising cost of superbikes does not directly affect most of us, they do appear to be dragging the prices of lower-spec bikes up with them too.

What are your thoughts on the cost of bikes and do you think that things have gone too far? Let us know in the comments below. If you are in the market for a new bike or anything else cycling-related make sure to head over to our dedicated buying guide page for all the information you could possibly need.