Bike badge engineering

[Goldie]

Badge engineering and platform sharing happens all the time in the car world, and I guess it must be fairly common in the bike world. I can think of one example of the top of my head - the Giant Metro, which turns up all over the place, like in Raleigh's catalogue as the Pioneer Metro. It got me thinking - what other examples are there? And are there any examples where you can get the same bike for less money, just by sacrificing the badge on the head tube?

Anyone know of any pretenders?

 

[mickle]

Hmmm. The last figures I recall of the top of my go something like this:

There are around two hundred brands of bicycle available to western buyers

90% of these bikes are manufactured in Taiwan

By just ten manufacturers.

So.

Kona use five different factories for their bikes.

Dahon (who also use five different factories in Taiwan for their range of folding bikes) produce bikes for brands which include Raleigh and Dawes.

80% of Giant's output is for other manufacturers. They have made bikes for most of the makes you can think of Specialized, Trek, Univega.


The fact is - most bike brands don't make bikes at all. Marin, Raleigh, Dawes, Claude Butler... Ridgeback.... GT, Schwinn...

 

[cyberknight]

If you look at enough frames you can see the ones that look the same .

Talking of car shared platforms did you know that the Toyota Aygo, the Citroen c1 and a Peugeot 107 are all made in the same factory and the only difference is the bumper and badge ?

Yet the Citroen is the cheapest of them all for the same car ......

I work for one of the Companies and they harped on about cost sharing blah blah , innovation etc etc when it was announced.

 

[the snail]

Nearly all bikes are manufactured in the far east, but not necessarily rebadged, some may be made to the brand's spec.