There’s No Good Reason to Buy a Carbon Bike

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.

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.

Probably the biggest drawback to carbon fiber bikes is that they’re like eggs. You know how eggs are almost impossible to break if you squeeze them from the pointy ends, but if you squeeze them any other way you’ll quickly wind up with a handful of yolk? Similarly, while carbon bikes are quite strong when used as designed, what they’re designed for is racing. They’re not designed for crashing, falling off a hitch rack, getting knocked over in the garage by your young children, or any of the other little mishaps that befall normal people’s bicycles as part of the messy business of day-to-day living.

Yes, plenty of those things also happen to pro racers’ bikes, but they don’t have to worry about it, because if the bike breaks in two after a crash or the baggage handlers at the airport manage to crack it the team just throws it away and gives them another one. But you don’t have that luxury. Crashing a carbon fiber bike can be a one-and-done scenario—and even if there’s no visible damage you can’t be sure it’s not structurally compromised without giving it an ultrasound. Even sitting on the top tube of a carbon fiber bike can potentially result in failure. Admittedly this is not terribly common, but the fact that it’s even a possibility is ludicrous.

And the daintiness isn’t just limited to accidents. You’ve also got to be really careful when working on a carbon fiber bicycle. Don’t clamp it in a repair stand. Don’t over-torque any of the fasteners. Don’t drop your multitool on that dainty top tube. Then there’s all the internal cable routing and press-fit bottom brackets and other maintenance headaches that are an unwelcome side-effect of all that wind tunnel testing. See, carbon bikes and components were designed to be serviced by shop technicians and team mechanics, not regular schmucks like you. In fact, you’ve probably even less qualified to work on them than you are to ride them.

Finally, let’s face it: carbon bikes are ugly. They look like they’re made of cheese. Have you looked at a Pinarello Dogma lately? It looks like it’s melting.

So what should bikes be made of then? What, do you even have to ask? Steel! They should all be made from steel.

For most uses, there’s little reason to build a bike out of anything other than steel. It’s light, it’s strong, it’s relatively inexpensive—it’s as close to being perfect as a bike material gets. Is it as light as carbon fiber? No, it isn’t. But so what? Unless you spend more time carrying your bike than riding it, a slight weight reduction is utterly meaningless, and foregoing a nice steel bike because the carbon one is lighter is like choosing a single $50 bill over twenty $5 bills because the fifty easier to fit in your wallet. Can a steel bike crack? Get destroyed in a crash? Get swept away by a tornado? Of course it can, anything’s possible. But generally speaking steel dents instead of cracks, if it does crack it fails very slowly instead of splintering, and for the most part steel is going to shrug off the kind of incidental abuse and hard knockage that’s an unavoidable part of owning, riding, working on, and traveling with a bike.

And if you’re one of those people who worries about steel bikes and rust, you can relax, because in order for rust to destroy your bike you’d pretty much have to store it at the bottom of the sea.

Best of all, steel bikes look fantastic. Assuming the designer hasn’t gone out of their way to make it ugly, or done something really stupid like equipping in with suspension, a steel bike is timeless. Meanwhile, a carbon bike is thrillingly cutting edge until it’s about two or three seasons old, at which point it becomes yesterday’s hunk of plastic and nobody wants it, including you.

And no, I’m not one of those retrogrouches who’s afraid of carbon bikes and thinks they’re all about to explode at any moment. In fact, I rode a 35 year-old carbon bike through the Swiss Alps. (It was a finely aged hunk of cheese.) Yes, I know they make airplanes out of it. Yes, I know it can often be repaired. Yes, I know the majority of people who own carbon fiber bikes won’t have a problem with them. But airplanes have a whole federal agency looking after them, and who the hell wants to have to send their bicycle frame out for repair because of some dumb little crash in the first place?

I’d much rather ride steel and just live with the dents and scratches, they give the bike character.