Published by Radical Life Studios / MTB Report by Robert Langer You can now buy a carbon eMTB with the most powerful motor on the market for under $5,000. That is the good news, and it is real. The uncomfortable half is that the motor comes from China, the frame has come from Asia for twenty years, and nobody took any of it from us. We sold it, on purpose, to protect margins. Start With the Price Tag: The 2027 model year is landing, and the numbers look nothing like the last two seasons. In the US, Ari is putting the Avinox M2S drive unit into the Wire Peak 3.0 for under $5,000. Over in Europe the same pattern is even sharper: Cube sells a carbon eMTB with the M2S and a removable 800 Wh battery for the equivalent of roughly $5,600, Conway starts its carbon Ryvon at about $6,100, and a Czech brand opens its Avinox range at around $4,900. Two years ago, carbon plus a flagship drive unit meant well north of $8,000. This is not a closeout. The pandemic inventory glut has largely been cleared, and production and sales in the biggest European market went back up in the first half of 2026. What you are looking at is a new price floor, not a fire sale. This is not a closeout. This is a new floor. You already know the script. China is flooding the market, prices are subsidized, next stop is whatever happened to Detroit. There is a kernel of truth in it: the single most valuable component on an eMTB, the drive unit, has moved to a Chinese supplier, and the industry does enjoy political tailwinds over there. Bicycles are not named as a strategic key industry in China’s current five-year plan, but the sector lines up neatly with several goals that do come with state money attached. What the script does not explain is how we got here. The decisions that made this possible were not made in Shenzhen. They were made in boardrooms in Colorado, California, Germany and the Netherlands, and most of them were made two decades ago. Give Away the Frame, Give Away the Bike A mountain bike is the frame. Stiffness, weight, durability, suspension kinematics: that is the product. Everything else can be bought off a shelf. Roughly 90 percent of all high-end production frames are built in Asia today, mostly Taiwan and mainland China, in aluminum and in carbon alike. That is not a handful of budget brands. That is almost every name hanging in your local shop. Santa Cruz, to pick a brand nobody would call a sellout, builds its frames in China and Taiwan and assembles them in California. The Taiwan-versus-China line is blurrier than the sticker suggests, too. Plenty of Taiwanese frame builders run their own plants on the mainland. „Made in Taiwan“ tells you where the company is, not always where the carbon was laid up. None of this happened for engineering reasons. Carbon frame building is still largely handwork, and handwork in North America or Western Europe is expensive. Add environmental permitting, add the fact that raw fiber and machined small parts come from Asia anyway, and the spreadsheet writes itself. It was a cost decision, never a quality decision. Even a Spanish boutique brand that built its whole identity on manufacturing in Barcelona moved production to Asia to hit a price. https://mtb-report.com/2026/09/21/nobody-stole-the-bike-industry-we-sold-it/ https://radicallifestudios.de https://mtb-report.com 🎧 think radical – live radical.
