LazyTrailRider

This is simply a result of less people being able to afford new cars. In wealthier countries, buying a new car is for most people not a stretch by any means, so there is less demand for used and thus the prices are lower.

Definitely. Now take that priority variance and add a wealth variance on top of it, and we have a pretty logical explanation of why some segments of the bike industry are booming and others are not.

Wealth is relative. Someone living in a shack likely thinks the same of you in your expensive house and a bicycle which you don't actually need for transport but use for something as frivolous as sport. They would probably be justified in thinking we have no clue about the material value of the things we take as granted.

@dave303e and @saggy I think the point (which has been flogged to death, but let's flog it again) is that no one needs any justification for "needing" an EB. What keeps cropping up time after time after time are a list of reasons (like you've explained above) why an EB is necessary. Very few people actually legitimately "need" an EB for these reasons, if they're 100% honest with themselves. That does not mean that they can't have one. I have zero "need" for one, but I like them so I have one. When do I ride it? Pretty much when I feel like it. If I'm feeling lazy or tired, I'll pull it from the rack and take it to Tokai. On days I'm feeling sharp, I'll take my analog trail bike. On most days to keep pushing my fitness (and also because I love it), I'll ride my gravel bike. All bikes are cool. EBs are bikes, so they're cool.

This nails the entire thread on the head 100%. Sad, but true.

Back to the topic at hand: My LBS is apparently one of the two top Specialized dealerships in the country. About 2 months ago they were waiting for a shipment of 80 Levos (yes, 80). Guess what? Almost all of them were pre-sold, the rest reserved as demo bikes. I have a great relationship with them, so I hear crazy stories all the time. For example, people walking in and buying 2 pairs of S-Works Recon shoes (R6k/pair) in different colours for different days. Make no mistake, there is a lot of money to be made if you can corner the top 5% of the market.

Haha, clearly the boom is still in full swing, based on @Headshot's CRC tip-off I also just picked up a Nukeproof Horizon V2 carbon bar at a claimed 51% off (even if BS, still going to be cheaper landed than a Lyne and it will match the glossy black carbon on the bike it's destined for) 😜

Sounds logical in principle, but over a 5 year period, it's not always that straightforward to beat financing costs with investment. I've tried both sides and have settled on buying cash...

Can you send me his details so I can interview him for the first episode of my podcast? 😜 (#jokingnotjoking)

Thanks for the inside info @ouzo 😶 I spent that much on a car payment when I was earning 4x that... Which very interestingly ties in with the sense I get that a large percentage of the population finances vehicles valued at least equal to their annual income, when my baseline is flipped around. Crazy.

Cashflow is very different to overall affordability. Even with a 30% residual (R210k) and a R100k cash deposit, a R700k "family crossover" is almost R10k/month over 72 months. Say it's worth R210k after 72 months, when the person trades it in they have zero, so they've lost that R100k they put in. Basically, it's not repeatable unless they had enough income to not need the residual in the first place... The question is actually: How are people paying for R1m vehicles *while* also saving for retirement? Just paying for it and continually being in a finance loop is one thing, but where does the investment income come from?

Vehicle affordability has always been a fascinating topic for me. As South Africans continue to become gradually poorer in real terms (this is unfortunately the reality) I find myself looking at specifically new vehicles on the roads in and around different neighbourhoods, wondering what the annual income to cost ratio is for each I see. I know it's not as simple as that (there are a million factors which affect each household's affordability besides annual income), but it's a nice starting point for a generalised comparison. Let's use my baseline: I drive a car which cost roughly 1/4 my annual income. I financed 50% of it at first because I only had about 70% of the cost available in cash I was willing to free up at that stage, but after a year the figures weren't making sense so I paid it off. Regardless, the 25% of annual is a comfortable cost to me. When I see people in their late 20s driving new Polos (which now cost R300-R400k), my brain by habit converts it to "surely this person can't at their age be earning R1.2m-R1.6m/year?" This habit also kicks in when I see someone I know who is a director of a fellow software dev house in his brand new Disco 5 (which are now R1.5m-R2m): I think "hang on, is he making R6m/year?" Yes, again I know it's not that simple because base living costs as a percentage reduce as you earn more, but then I'm also thinking "he's not parking that Disco 5 in the garage of house which only costs R4m..." My wife has said several times I need to start an podcast series where I chat to people (anonymously) about the cars they drive and what their financial situation looks like to be able to afford it, from cheapies to ultra-luxury vehicles. I think it could be a fascinating read/listen!

A modern-geo mid-travel light EB is definitely something that tickles my fancy. I have a 2021 Levo SL and a 2022 Stumpy Evo. I've been tempted to sell the Stumpy because I don't get to ride it more than once a week (my weekdays are spent on a Diverge), but: Every time I ride the Stumpy I'm reminded of just how much of a difference a proper slack HA / steep SA can make. You'll hear plenty of people on here tell you that it's all marketing bollocks and that no one really needs this modern geo wizardry, but I can honestly tell you (with a straight face after having ridden both back-to-back for months) that it makes a massive difference. Planted, stable, fast. Love it. The Trek is appealing to me purely because of this, but then again I might get kicked out of the house if I buy another bike this year so I'll probably wait for the next Levo SL...

Yup. They're expensive, inefficient, require maintenance, need to be installed on a massively reinforced base and are way too noisy for urban use. We live in a densely populated area and our plot is only 500sqm, so the only semi-feasible installation point would be 3m from someone's bedroom window in the next-door townhouse complex. Nope.

Yip, completely expected, and we haven't actually seen much of the usual proper winter weather (with entire weeks of rain) yet. The reality is that the graph swings drastically in Cape Town. Case in point (@Schnavel have a look at the JHB comparison): https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/451432-why-south-african-solar-power-systems-can-underperform-in-winter.html

I've seen research where testers were able to destroy a lead acid battery to 10% of its efficiency within a week by treating it poorly.

I think we're underestimating the biggest factor here: We live in different parts of the country (if, as your profile shows, you are indeed in JHB) 🙂 The Southern Suburbs are basically Mordor in winter. Cape Town as a whole has almost an hour less sunlight currently than JHB, and on top of that our house is 3km from where the mountain slopes begin properly, so we lose direct sunlight very early in the afternoon. Around these parts, people are spending R500k+ on modest size properties to get to 95% independence levels. Rough, but it is what it is. Ironically, in CPT it's a fact that the more expensive your property is, the more likely it is to be against a slope of some kind, which kills your generation on whatever side it happens to be.

In summer yes, ask him what his figures look like for the last month... I have 4.8kW of panels facing NNE on a sloped roof (basically perfect positioning), 6/8kW inverter and a 10kWh battery. Our house - in Claremont, Southern Suburbs - is a small 170sqm, we're two adults, we don't have a pool or underfloor heating or anything that consumes heavily except for the fact that our oven/hob is not gas. Our base load (basically fridges, router and mesh wifi, garden lights) is only 400W. In addition to that, the geyser is customised to 2kW and runs off a timer so that it only draws during peak generation hours and for 50min at night before our showers, and 50min in the morning before showers. In addition to this, we run on grid power from 18h30 to 21h00 so that the evening's cooking activities don't nail the battery too badly. 2 weeks ago it was overcast and we had a 24-hour transformer outage in the neighbourhood. The battery got us 15 hours with us basically going full eco mode with the geyser completely off. Below is what my Eskom usage since July 2019 (when the setup was installed) looks like. The picture would be very different for a more "traditional" family home with kids, pool, and all the stuff us hippies in the South don't want 😉

Spot on. There are very, very few scenarios where actually disconnecting from the grid (or never connecting in the first place) are feasible. For the other 99% of scenarios, you need availability, whether it's a little or a lot is secondary. The only people I know with conventional city-dweller lifestyles who are what people so easily call "off-grid" are those that have spent anything from R500k to R1.5m on their systems. The systems seen on this thread (mine is one of those with a R200k outlay) get you to 70-80%, but the remainder is 3-4x this cost and quite simply doesn't make sense financially. It can make sense in other ways, but not financially. To be able to tell Eskom to take a hike, you need to - in my experience - oversize your system 5-6x the level that it needs to be at in summer when there is plenty of sun....

Noooooooo!

That would be Kylie and Tarryn, not sure if they're on here...

What's a "fair profit" though? No such thing exists. It's the same as "XYZ used to pay decent wages", but what's a "decent wage"? If I can figure out a way to produce something for 5% of the cost my competitors are able to, you can be damn sure I'm going to take all the profit I can. That's why innovation is one of the core enablers of capitalism... In addition to that, market dynamics also incentivise me to charge as high a price as the market is willing to bear. If it's too high, I'll lose demand and it will equalise. Importantly though, this only materialises at scale. In small volume industries, widespread value awareness is either not always present, or it's countered by the law of "good luck finding this somewhere else" 😜 My business is currently busy building a SaaS product, an industry where one of the core ways of making money is automating everything down to the very last little micro-process to get direct unit costs as close to zero as possible. Notions of "fair profit" flew out the window on day 1 of our planning process...

Haha. Yes, that R10k cost will escalate very quickly...

Or buy some *proper* winter kit (R10k can get you a fair way) and keep on riding outside on all but the very worst days... 😜

Please keep the triggers limited, the anger management therapy bill from that previous Garmin experience is already more than what the watch cost.