hydorah":pkpxe5tr said:
And tellingly, the Activator II was available for £200 in May '94. Definitely smells of a cash in at £260
Anybody here up on what else what around at these price points back then???
Interesting facts. For example butted cro-mo steel Liyang on A-10 groupset is about same money BITD and basic Scott Timber on A-20 is just slightly more expensive if I'm converting right from dollars. They're twice less heavy rigid bikes.
Also bear on mind, I've choosen Taiwanese bikes, which were way cheaper to make.
Activator's price reflect UK staff salary so all money went there instead of quality. That's why Activator cost so much in comparison. European made bikes had struggled to compete with decent and cheap bikes from Far East.
Was a very similar situation at early 90's with large polish bikes producer Romet. Romet was a large national company at that time; they even tried making a pressure on government to ban import of Taiwanese bikes to survive on market. That never happen so factory had slowly died couldn’t compete with own gas pipe mountain bikes.
Before that happened, Romet tried been smart like Raleigh and came up with fancy monoque look alike frame named "Vulcanus" made from pig steel and weight a tonne. Kids still keep buying them because they were cool looking, at least at that time and utterly rubbish. Same thing with Activator, wow a full suser in rigid bike price, fantastic!
Peugeot, Raleigh, Romet etc. Same story with every large national company. Remember Tim Gould signed Peugeot replica on hi-ten steel and TY-20 group? Very low marketing play but why? To survive.
So, no there's no cynic in price at all, is the fact production costs were too high to be competitive on mass market bikes.
