Why Carbon eMTB Frames Cost What They Do

EDITOR'S NOTE

I'll be honest with you. Before this year, I thought carbon frames were overpriced. Not by a little. By a lot. After eight years in the e-bike industry, owning retail stores, distributing brands, and selling more bikes than I can count, I had convinced myself that somewhere along the supply chain, someone was taking a massive margin and calling it engineering.

I was wrong.

In January this year, Dick and I flew to Europe to represent Velduro at the Velo Follies expo, then visited the Giant factory in the Netherlands to see how carbon bikes are assembled at scale. From there, we flew into China to visit the factory that builds our Velduro frames, and to meet the owners of a potential new factory for our upcoming all-mountain model.

What we saw over those few days changed how I understand this industry.

The first 30 minutes

Walking into the factory, the first thing that hit me was the sheer scale of it. Eight storeys high. Every single floor dedicated to one specific part of making a carbon frame. Not bikes. Just frames.

Within half an hour of arriving, the light bulb went on. I finally understood why these things cost what they do.

Right there on the wall near the entrance was a full breakdown of the production process. Eighty-one steps. That is the number of individual steps it takes to produce one carbon frame, from raw material through to the finished product, packed in a box and ready to ship. If any one of those eighty-one steps fails quality control, the frame either goes back to be fixed or the whole process starts again from scratch.

Eighty-one steps. I genuinely had no idea.

What actually happens on the factory floor

Most riders assume carbon frames are largely made by machines. I did too. The reality is almost the opposite.

The process starts with carbon sheets being cut by CNC machines into specific shapes, wedges, triangles, and diamonds, not unlike cutting pieces of protective film for your bike. Those pieces are then individually weighed. After that, each piece is hand laid over a mould by a professional staff member. They wrap the carbon around the mould by hand, piece by piece, with the kind of precision you would use applying a very thick, very accurate sticker. Air bladders inside the mould can be inflated to apply internal pressure and adjust the shape as the frame takes form.

Once the carbon is hand laid, the frame in its mould (tool) is heated to over 180 degrees Celsius. That curing process bonds the carbon layers together and sets the shape permanently. After that comes sanding, sealing, more sanding, additional carbon added to any weak points, and then structural testing.

Each mould(tool) can produce seven frames per day. Seven. Each frame has 81 steps in its production before it is complete.  These steps, and being able to only produce 7 frames per tool, are the ceiling regardless of how many workers are on the floor. You cannot speed it up. The intricate steps to create this handmade frame is the bottleneck, and that single fact tells you most of what you need to know about why carbon frames are priced the way they are.

The Testing

This was the part that genuinely surprised me the most.

Out of each production batch, frames are pulled for structural testing. The machines used for this, built in Germany and the Netherlands, take a single impact point on a frame and test it to a set tolerance, over 100,000 times in a row. That process takes seven continuous days to complete. What it is simulating is the real-world stress a rider puts through a frame on the trail, every landing, every rock strike, every hard pedal stroke under load, run continuously for a week.

If a frame fails, more carbon is added to the weak points, and it goes through again. The frame does not leave until it passes every test. It is not until this testing process is complete that the factory will begin to build in numbers.  Even when the process is logged into the system, 1 of every 10 frames is again tested for structural integrity.  This allows Velduro the confidence to know our frames are built to last.

For Velduro, we specify our frames to be tested to Category 5, the highest structural rating under the mountain bike standard. We have the factory certification to back that up. Category 5 represents the most demanding riding conditions the standard accounts for, and it is a level only the world's top brands build to. That is not something we decided lightly. I watched those machines. I saw exactly what that standard requires, and it's insane!

The XL delay

When we first launched Velduro, we took pre-orders across all frame sizes: Small, Medium, Large, and XL. Our XL frames were delayed by 12 weeks. At the time, I understood why riders were frustrated. Pre-orders are a commitment and waiting is not fun.

After visiting the factory, I understand what actually happened. The larger frame geometry had to pass the same structural tests as every other size, and with a bigger, longer frame being ridden hard by larger riders, that process takes time and does not get rushed. The factory was not cutting corners or deprioritising our order. They were making sure the frame would hold up. That delay was the factory doing its job properly.

I wish I could have explained that better at the time. Now I can.

The factory itself

The factory has been making carbon fibre frames since 1996. They did not start with bikes. They developed the carbon fibre technology originally for table tennis bats and were among the first in the world to move that technology into cycling frames.

The raw carbon material arrives in large sheets produced by Mitsubishi, manufactured in Korea and Japan. From there, the factory takes over, and every step after that point is done on-site.

What also surprised me was what else was being made there. Brands you would recognise straight away, household names in cycling, were mass-producing frames in the same factory through the same process. The carbon bike industry is smaller and more connected than most riders realise. The process does not change based on the badge on the frame. What changes is who you are building for and what tolerances you are specifying.

The working environment was nothing like what I expected. The place was spotless, clean enough to eat off the floors. Staff had worked there across multiple generations. There were community noticeboards, announcements about holidays and upcoming events. These were not people just doing a job. They were people who took genuine pride in what they made.

So is it worth it?

The Velduro Rogue frame is $8,499 NZD. For context, other well-known brands' framesets, just the carbon frame with no components and no build, retail for over $13K NZD here in New Zealand.

Both frames come out of the same type of factory. The same hand-laying process. The same eighty-plus steps. The same structural testing.

The price of a carbon eMTB frame is not a rip-off. It is the real cost of something made by hand, tested to a standard that has to hold up to whatever your trials throw at it, over more than 100,000 load cycles before it gets anywhere near a rider.

I went to China expecting to find out where the margin was hiding. What I found instead was why the price makes sense.

Velduro is a New Zealand and China collaboration, and we do not hide that. We are proud of it. The factory that builds our frames has been doing this since before most of our riders started riding, and the brands sharing that factory floor are some of the biggest names in the sport. That is not something to apologise for. That is something to build on.

Judge us on our bikes. We are comfortable with that.