[wiseleo]

The problem is that “mountain bike” means two things. To an MTB rider, it’s a vehicle optimized for mountain riding where the top priority is rider’s safety.

To everyone else, it’s a category of vehicles capable of off-pavement riding on trails. They should be referred to off-pavement bikes.

[grogenaut]

Mountain bikes are like SUVs. Only a small % of people take either off road or in any way challenge their capabilities.

But the same can be said for most bikes. Very few folks actually run the tour de france or any other competitive race. People get all excited by capabilities or let those who do know and use those features influence their buying.

[theelous3]

This is simply untrue. For the standard of bike that someone who knows bikes would call a mountain bike - they are ridden on trails regularly. People are not spending 3k+ on a really inefficient and slow bike to ride around their cities and neighborhoods.

You presumably are not actually knowledgeable about mountain bikes and riding them?

[grogenaut]

"No true mountain biker would ever call this a mountain bike"... yet go in any sporting goods store, anything with fat tires and or a suspension, upright handlebars, thumb shifters, it's likely labeled a mountain bike and would probably disintegrate on a downhill or cross trail. It's still a mountain bike to 95% of people.

And yes, I used to cross trail several times a year in MO and mtb park (duthie hill) downhill (stevens) when I moved to Seattle, then watched several people get massive concussions and stayed with snowboarding.

If a thing becomes mainstream it gets diluted. The top 1% definition of a thing is not the thing exclusively.

[theelous3]

> It's still a mountain bike to 95% of people.

Pal, come _on_. Read my initial comment, and any other comment thereafter. I was very clear and explicit that I was giving this criticism from the perspective of not "anybody" but rather someone who actively mountain bikes.

You're still not understanding. Those bikes you were talking about - while they may be marketed as 'mountain bikes' (a term anybody can use for anything) - are not fit for the purpose of mountain biking (a set of well establish sports and related types of riding).

You have now moved on to confusing the way marketers lie in their descriptions of bikes in order to sell to the ignorant, with the actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein.

> The top 1% definition of a thing is not the thing exclusively.

Everybody who mountain bikes (more than once har har har) does so on an actual mountain bike. It's not the 1%. It's more like the 99%. People don't repeatedly take these wallmart bikes down trails. Nobody survives that setup long enough to make it in to the group you can by any good standard call mountain bikers.

Go to your local trail that isn't some fireroad or featureless single track, and tell me how many people you see on shit bikes like this.

You know, I'd normally agree with you about this diluted point as it relates to many other things, but I can't here. For example - car racing is not just formula 1 or other top tier engineering categories. The vast majority of car racing is amateur and hobby stuff in comparatively low or very low spec vehicles. The difference is that you can "technically" compete with a formula one car on a racetrack in a 1997 nissan micra with 40hp. The micra can cruise around the track basically indefinitely, stopping only for fuel - and complete the race days after the f1 car. A road is a road.

This is not the case with mountain biking. All non mountain bikes basically explode on contact with mountains. It's self selecting such that people who continue to mountain bike past the first outing or two, must do so on a purpose built good quality bike.

It is in this distinction, that you are missing the point.

It's unacceptable to me that when I have _clearly_ been talking in the context of real mountain biking, you are now deciding, it seems, to take the totally walked back, side stepped, and frankly revisionist approach of only now saying "well technically these bikes are labeled mountain bikes so I'm right". Nuh uh.

[CRConrad]

> I was very clear and explicit that I was giving this criticism from the perspective of not "anybody" but rather someone who actively mountain bikes

Yeah, and everybody else was pretty clear and explicit that that perspective is irrelevant to, like, 95% of people.

Edited to add:

> You have now moved on to confusing the way marketers lie in their descriptions of bikes in order to sell to the ignorant, with the actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein.

That's not the problem. The problem is that you started out by confusing the "actual and established sports that comprise mountain biking and the bikes used therein" with this discussion, which was an ordinary amateur consumer talking about ordinary amateur consumer products and reviews thereof, and every time someone tried to steer the discussion back to the topic at hand, you've gotten more and more snitty-snotty about your irrelevant No True Mountain-Biking Scotsman perspective.

HTH!