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There’s No Good Reason to Buy a Carbon Bike

The pro racers who do need carbon fiber bikes get them for free. Only the people who don’t need them actually pay for them.

Carbon fiber is light. It’s strong. It can be used to build everything from frames to seat posts to handlebars to cranks. And it’s one of the worst things that’s happened to bikes.

Now, to be clear, carbon fiber makes perfect sense for professional racing. Because it’s basically a fabric, builders can mold it into all sorts of aerodynamic shapes. Moreover, they can tune ride quality and maintain strength while simultaneously keeping the weight to a minimum in a way that’s not really possible with metal tubing. It used to be that racers had to choose between a light bike and an aero bike; now they can have both, all thanks to the miraculous properties of carbon fiber. At this point, there’s no reason for elite competitors to use anything else.
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But here’s the thing: you’re not them. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but you’re almost certainly incapable of milking the handful of seconds a wind tunnel-sculpted pro-level carbon fiber race machine might theoretically net you in certain situations. Moreover, the pro racers who do need carbon fiber bikes get them for free; only the people who don’t need them actually pay for them. This means that, ipso facto, if you’ve purchased a carbon fiber bicycle, you’ve made a mistake.

“Okay, fine, I may not be Jonas Vingegaard,” you may be thinking. “Maybe I didn’t need a carbon bike. But how does that mean I’ve made a mistake?”

Simple: while you’re not able to extract carbon fiber’s small performance benefits, you are in an ideal position to experience its many drawbacks—and for normal people, carbon fiber bicycles have only drawbacks.

This is Bike Snob NYC writing for Outside Online, by the way.