The Elite Custom Carbon bottle cage is a thing of rare beauty. Not so rare that you couldn’t have one if you splashed €90 at a speciality bicycle store, but it’s a lot to pay just to clamp a water bottle to a bike. The reason for the expense is in the name: make a bike product from carbon fibre and you can hike the price. It’s the cult of composites. Drooling, semi-sarcastically, over the cage, blogger BikeSnobNYC wrote: “If you’ve ever removed a sterling silver Tiffany letter opener from a velvet pouch, withdrawn a handmade sword from its jewelled scabbard, or taken a bottle of Château Margaux from its rack in a musty wine cellar in Provence, you can begin to appreciate what it’s like to pull a plastic bidon from an Elite Custom Carbon cage.”
It helps that Elite is an Italian company. And, to the cycle cognoscenti, ‘Italian’ is shorthand for ‘quality.’

Reviewing the same carbon bottle cage, Competitivecyclist.com wrote: “In a marketplace of Taiwanese knock-offs, the Custom Carbon…has a beauty that magically makes concern for price disappear.”

Unknown to most upscale bike buyers, many ‘Made in Italy’ components are shipped from the Far East. The Elite bottle cage is still made in Italy, but a growing proportion of Elite products are made in China.
Even maven marques such as Italy’s Colnago now opt to have at least some of their bicycles made in Taiwan.
On a 2005 ride with Eddy Merckx, owner of the eponymous bicycle brand [see box overleaf], I was told the link up between Colnago and a Taiwanese bicycle maker was doomed.

It’s crazy. What’s [founder Ernesto Colnago] doing it for? Colnago is famous for ‘Made in Italy’. I don’t understand why he would want to change that,” said Merckx However, that was 2005. Today, few in the trade think the move was a sell-out. To insiders, Taiwan is no longer a byword for ‘knock offs’; it’s where you go when you want the very best in bicycle manufacturing.

This focus on quality didn’t happen by accident. In the 1980s, Taiwanese bicycle makers made most of the mountain bikes that flooded the US and Europe, but by the end of the 1990s production had shifted to factories with lower overheads, factories in China, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Taiwanese bicycle makers could have capitulated, as British bicycle makers did back in the 1960s, but instead, many of the long-standing Taiwanese bike makers moved upmarket.

Taiwan now specialises in manufacturing bikes costing €160 or more. Taiwanese companies are projected to control 60% of the world’s market for ‘expensive’ bicycles by 2012, a 40% expansion within a five-year period, crows Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA).

MOEA’s growth projection isn’t fanciful, it’s an achievable plan hatched by the so-called A-Team, a non-profit organisation founded in 2002 and made up of 21 leading Taiwanese bicycle and components makers.

The moving force in the A-Team is Giant, a $1bn bicycle company currently growing at around 10% a year. Giant is a globally available brand in its own right, counting for 70% of sales, but it’s also a contract manufacturer, making bikes for the likes of Trek, America’s number one speciality bicycle brand. Based in Tachia, a two-hour drive from the capital Taipei, the Giant factory, C-Tech, churns out bicycles for distribution in 60 countries. Most are utilitarian but a significant number are high-end bicycles, made from composites, destined for upscale customers.

Giant has been making carbon fibre bike frames since 1985. It is a leader today because it was such an early mover then, and winning the contract to make mid-range carbon fibre frames for Colnago, considered by many fans to be the Ferrari of bicycle makers, is proof. Indeed, in the same year the contract was won (2005) Colnago became a sponsor member of the A-Team.

C-Tech’s product development engineers use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to design bicycles fit for use in the Tour de France. The stresses and strains a pro rider puts into a road frame are immense, and varied: sprinters want lateral stiffness, col climbers desire torsional stiffness.

Behind it all is a white heat of product development, sustained over the past 25 years. Back in 1987, the weight of a Giant carbon road frame was 1,600g, now it’s half that. American companies like Cannondale and Specialized emphasise their Tour credentials in advertising campaigns but – thanks to drugs busts – pro-cycling has taken a PR battering in the last few years. Having a Tour bike is no longer the money magnet it was when Lance Armstrong rode to seven Tour victories on a series of high-tech Treks. The biggest growth area in road cycling is actually sportive riding. Sportives are one-day, long-distance challenge rides aimed, for the most part, at older, more affluent amateur riders, many of them entrepreneurs and executives. There are no weight restrictions on the bikes used, unlike in professional cycling, and even less constraint on pricing. The resulting boom in ultra-high-end, couture bikes is everywhere to be seen from the US to Europe and beyond.

Storck Bikes of Bad Camberg in Germany has built its business on riders seeking ultra-lightweight fast bikes for sportives and training – bikes that would be banned in open competition. The Storck Fascenario 0.7, when built up with the costliest wheels and the slippiest go-faster parts, tips the scales at 4.8kg – 2kg under the official limit for pros. That’s just 10.7lbs of bicycle – and all yours for €13,200.

Storck grew by 40% in 2007. Marcus Storck, a former bike shop owner of Frankfurt, and a member of the organising committee of the first Eurobike show in 1991, founded the company with 3i investment in 1989.

Storck Bicycles holds 30 patents and has won numerous design awards, but it does not manufacture in Germany. Marcus Storck has most of his bikes made in China. Purists argue that high-end bicycles are not supposed to be made in China, they are meant to be hand-crafted by chain-smoking artisans, welding gossamer-thin steel tubes in dank workshops, all for love not money.

But carbon’s not like that. Composite bike frames are made in sterile, well-lit labs. Carbon fibres are mixed with resin to form a ‘pre-preg’, a pre-impregnated sheet, wound between release paper. This is then laid up on moulds in varying thicknesses and angles to form the frame shape. For resin, read plastic.

Consumers are catching on that ‘plastic’ bikes are getting easier to manufacture, cannot be recycled and have other drawbacks too. For instance, carbon nanotubes, used on some high-end bike parts, could be carcinogenic to those not properly protected when working with the material. One day there could be a carbon backlash. It may have already started. Some high-end cyclists hanker after the human touch, and are willing to pay for it. In the US there has been resurgence in interest in craftsmen-built bicycles. This generally means steel or titanium bicycles although Calfee Design of California – involved with composites since 1988 – is now noted for its race bikes made from eco-friendly bamboo. Those interested in artisan bikes – a growing number, if blog posts and bike magazine stories are anything to go by – get their fix at the annual North American Handmade Bicycle Show. NAHBS was first held in Houston, Texas, in 2004 and had 23 exhibitors. In 2008 the show moved to Portland, Oregon – America’s most bike-friendly city – and sold out at 155 exhibitors.

Founder Don Walker says: “It is a niche market show, that’s the point of it. It’s not about huge crowds, it’s about top-end bicycles for cyclists with a preference for the best.” Next year, Europe will get its own version of NAHBS. The European Handmade Bicycle Exhibition is to be held in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, in May.

Neil Hassan, owner of framebuilding chatroom Frameforum.org, says: “It is hoped the EHBE will do for the European framebuilding community what NAHBS has done for the US framebuilding scene. In just four years, NAHBS has turned custom bicycle manufacturing in the USA from an almost forgotten sector of the bicycle market into a booming, vibrant part of the US bike trade. Many builders are reporting full order books.”

Long waiting lists may be good for the ego, but they’re bad for the bottom line. But if – and this is heresy – successful craft builders turn to Taiwan and China to help them satisfy demand, they’ll be in good company.