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Planet X Exocet

Has anyone else notice teh 500 quid increase on the exocet. 220 reviewed this when it was 2000 and now they raised the price due to high demand. I was wondering whether the 92% can still be justified at this price or whether there are now other contenders.

Either way 220 should update there reviews if the biker has increased by 25%

Any takers?

Chrissybaby

Comments

  • QuitterQuitter Posts: 160
    Reviews are for people who cant make up their mind and as tested at the time.
    Still a bargain tho IMHO.
    The comment that you'll have to spend £500 on race wheels/tubs n cassette still applies to the other bike so even at the same price surely the PX is still the winner?

    Chocolate bars seem to be creeping up in price but I,m not going to alter my opinion about them.
  • shadowone1shadowone1 Posts: 1,408
    So you compare a chocolate bar to a bike.... nice comparison.

    Now I've not looked at the costs/ adverts/ website because I think the exocet is just plain ugly. However I wouldn't be best pleased if someone had just bought an identical bike for £500 less.

    Unless the models are different in some way then there is no justification for a price hike like that.
  • QuitterQuitter Posts: 160
    shadowone1 wrote:
    So you compare a chocolate bar to a bike.... nice comparison.
    There are some very nice chocolate bars out there.......

    Most TT bikes look the same...in fact hide the headstock and they virtually all follow the Cervelo original curved downtube profile. Put em in silouette (sp) and play guess the bike

    Would altering the review score really change anyones mind? The £500 hike may cause some to decide to go elsewhere but that is the risk a retailer takes.
  • LancsRiderLancsRider Posts: 205
    Error whilst Doing a Replacement, Error in srv_convert.
  • shadowone1shadowone1 Posts: 1,408
    Not sure I wholly agree with that.

    Magazines often don't give bad rating due to the kit they get for free - look at the tigerfrog and Fuji reviews in 220 - Are you seriously telling me the tigerfrog is better than the fuji... The TF bike is completely disgusting. Often magazine give better reviews than they really are worth getting due advertising revenue they get from the kit they review. They are not going to write off a bike/ kit when they spend £x pounds on advertising either directly or through a subsid company.

    I've owned two TT's bikes. One which I could not simply take to and sold it on and the one which without question is an excellent bike. However what works for me may not work for you.

    Try googling the new Cannondale TT bike that was featured in the Vuelta at the weekend - some peeps like, some don't. I personally think its nicked a load of ideas from Trek. However the seat post - dear o dear...what were they thinking.

    I don't like Cervelo's or PX - they simply don't do it for me. So when I see a review - regardless of who it is I don't really take any notice. At the end of the day - are we really good enough to get the best out of the bike we have - I'm certainly not but I have a great TT bike.
  • LancsRiderLancsRider Posts: 205
    I understand a lot of the points you are making here.

    I totally agree that when it comes to TT bikes fit is so important, hence the growing market in bike fit services, some I feel know what they are talking about, others going through quite a blinkered process to push out a result. The truth is that for most people there will be one or two ideal frames, one or two not suited at all and the middle of the pack which through seat and front end set ups can be made to be more or less the right position for comfort if not performance.

    The magazines tread a very diplomatic position in this respect because they have advertisers from both the manufacturers and bike fit market. As such they are not going to come out and say brand X will not work for you if you are built like this and give an anthroprometric chart of body measurements for you to work on. In a similar way they are very carefull about not saying how agressive some, not all, of these top end bikes are to ride. In many ways I do not have an issue with the magazines as they are what they are a commercial operation, and so I agree with you in that the best thing is often to ignore them.

    What I do have a problem with is their position taken as the font of all knowledge, in what I think is a relatively unexperienced market, i.e. many individuals coming to the sport with little or no real cycling background, takinging up Tri as a first sport or comming from running, swimming or some other competitive background.

    A good mirror example is the massive growth in sportive ridding. I do a lot of my training in the Pennines around the Trough of Bowland area, and as a result I see a number of riders in the Spring and Summer periods. It does not surprise me now when I see riders really struggling on descents trying to handle carbon race bikes often with aero wheels whoose geometries are very tight and designed for out and out bike racing. Some of these bike in the past would have been described as simply criterium machines, and 1st Cat riders would have treated them as such and had something else more suited to riding out in the hills. These same riders on the flat are not pushing these bikes rasther they are sat up cruising along at gentle paces in respect to what would be steady state riding for a road racer. This is their perogative, I am simply questioning why they are not on a more comfortable bike.

    I have to be careful what I say here but coming from a cycle retail background, I have had people in the retail industry, this week valued as part of 2.9 Billion cycle sector, say sales are really easy. I can not say what the nickname I was given for a large group of current consumers, but basicly they implies you can sell sand to the Arabs, they havn't a clue about bikes or what they need, and that 90% of sales they make are based on aesthetics. In looking through forums and comments on TT bikes I would think this argument is supported in that opinions abound regarding what a bike looks like, but I can hardly ever find comments regarding what the geometry is and how this affects ridding charecteristics.

    The origonal post raises the issue of are the magazines being fair in their review processes when reatailers can change parameters such as price. To be honest there is a much bigger picture here. Is the whole bicycle retail sector being fair to an emerging market which has little in the way of background knowledge / experience. Or does it see the market as currently being a lucrative cash cow and to get as much from it before the bubble bursts. I would hope that a responsible British sector would want to grow and develop the market along mainland European lines thus securing a sustainable future, to be honest I am not too sure it really does!
  • shadowone1shadowone1 Posts: 1,408
    Couldn't agree with you more fella....

    You raise some really good points here. There's not much I can really add to that as you summed it up brilliantly

    What I will add is that I came into triathlon/ bike riding having not ridden a bike in 10-15yrs. So my first new bike was made purely on how it looked as I knew nothing about them but it wasn't so much a risk as it cost a paltry £350 which is peanuts compared to whats on offer now. However I later found out that the bike didn't fit and that in effect had been sold a turd of a bike. So this goes back to your point about trust, and finding that retailer than you do trust. They do exist however.
  • LancsRiderLancsRider Posts: 205
    Was out training today and thought this through a bit more as to why we are where we are today. In the mid eighties I had a bike/tri shop one of only a handful in the country. Our philosophy was always sell someone a good £350 bike (needed to be at that level to make sure everything was good enough for serious milages hence reliability), set up the position for free and take time to do so, if needed swap components like for like, dont charge for this service. For everyone with narrow shoulders on a medium frame, there will be someone with wide shoulders on a small frame for example. Next thing you know the person comes back a spends cash on accesories, normally clothing for the winter because they dont stop ridding, clipless pedals and shoes to match etc. In a year or two surprise, surprise they come back wanting a new bike. Repeat process this time on a bike which reflects their new skill levels, possibly £750 or so. Wait a year or so and they are back again, this time they want a bespoke hand made frame 'perfect' for their size/shape and ridding style. Often budget is one of no limit at this point and you have a friend for life! The bike shop is happy, the customer is happy, local businesses such as frame builders enamalers etc are supported and so on. The offshoot there were some really beautiful machines out there, and it was really easy to innovate, we were building 80 degree tri bikes with Zipp carbon tri spokes, profile bar set ups, Hope engineered components before most people had ever seen anything like it, all made to measure. We used a local tailor to take body measurements and Snugg made up wetsuits which fitted like a glove for example.

    So what went wrong. Firstly mail order which soon led into internet operations undercutting the local bike shop. The next problem was exotic materials, firstly titanium which was fantastic untill melted down Soviet fighter stock got into the mix and there were casualties literaly in climbing and caving when titanium carabiners fractured which was psychologically linked back into failures in cycle components hence titanium was no longer sexy but a potential liability. This eventually led into carbon fibre why is sexy but can not be build up in small numbers, rather it is a very expensive tooling operation before the first component is sold.

    The end result is what we are faced with today, namely you have to fit the bike, rather than the bike fits you. Not too bad if you are mr or mrs average because that is where the market is. Like Henry Ford said you can have it in any colour as long as it is black. Components are now ruled by the major players, Campagnolo a historical great borderline in this respect, on production bikes to the point it often makes no sense building from scratch because you are fighting against a pricing policy which suits the industry not the consumer. As a result the consumer is disempowered and left with making decisions based on economics simply thinking mail order is so much cheaper. They feel they either don't know what the right questions are to ask, and if they did what would be the point because they suspect very few would know the answers anyway. Unfortunatly there has been a cultural change in the bicycling culture in this country which is not for the better. This change is reflected / partly down to magazines and retailers. Before people say bikes are so much better now, of course they are, but they would have been anyway. In my opinion the culture has not evolved with the growth in both cycling and triathlon, rather it has stepped back into a lesser culture of commercialism.
  • QuitterQuitter Posts: 160
    As any sport grows and becomes "popular" (Yeah thanks Brownlees....now look what you've done... ) there is the inevitable jumping on the bandwagon by the sheep. Aethetics do count but there are enough riders out there with enough knowledge and confidence to buy smart. When the sheep have finished with their five rides a year bikes its bargains for the rest of us. Even if a LBS like yourself (Lancsrider)had got involved with those types they still would only have ridden on warm dry days.

    I believe we are all basically agreeing here (dammit ) that even if something is reviewed in a good light the buyer has to satisfy himself its going to work for him.
  • JulesJules Posts: 987
    Planet X have to be a bit careful with sneaky price rises, after all price is their main selling point.

    I wonder if they've had issues with sales of their cheaper TT bike, the Stealth Pro Carbon? A fully blinged up Stealth Pro (DA, 80/101 wheels etc) with a very similar spec to the Excocet is £2000. A £2000 Excocet must have hit sales of the Stealth Pro.
  • QuitterQuitter Posts: 160
    Jules wrote:
    Planet X have to be a bit careful with sneaky price rises, after all price is their main selling point.

    I wonder if they've had issues with sales of their cheaper TT bike, the Stealth Pro Carbon? A fully blinged up Stealth Pro (DA, 80/101 wheels etc) with a very similar spec to the Excocet is £2000. A £2000 Excocet must have hit sales of the Stealth Pro.
    I think the introduction of the Exocet has now made the Stealth cheap enough..I mean such good value for some to justify having a TT/Triathlon specific bike as well as a normal drop bar bike?
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