On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

I previously showed the Canyon Aeroroad. But Canyon's perhaps more popular bike is the Ultimate, a perennial competitor for Tour Magazine's lab-dominated bike of the year ratings. A prime competitor is Storck, a more niche German company known for its engineering-based approach to bike design. Included in that approach is a relatively unique approach to geometry. Here's a comparison of Trek, Specialized, Canyon, and Storck road bikes, where I've left off the endurance bikes this time: Canyon is clearly sticking to the stack-reach design philosophy with both of its models. And for once a bike company does the obvious which is to make the aero bike lower. And the longest Ultimate is incredibly long. It must be those tall Norwegian customers. But the Storck 0.6 is a bit bizarre. The smallest size differs only in stem length, essentially (actually with the head tube angle being slacker than 73 deg, slammed stem will result in the smallest being slightly higher). Th...

More stack-reach comparisons, retaining the tall (Cervelo R5) and long (Trek Madone H1) winners from last time: First, there's a new obvious "tall" winner, and that's the Parlee Z5 tall model. Of course this isn't a fair comparison, as it would make more sense to compare the Parlee tall geometry to the endurance geometries of other bikes, but I put this here for comparison since I recently test-rode a Parlee ESX. The regular Parlee Z5 geometry corresponds to around 2.5 cm less spacer height, and has more traditional road racing geometry (clearly not designed to a stack-reach spec, however, since the curve zig-zags). Specialized is interesting, as the smallest 3 models are essentially constant reach, changing only in stack. This is because top tube length is directly canceled by seat tube angle. This keeps the reach the same as the top tube is lengthened. The bikes still fit bigger riders, however: adding spacers to the smaller frames would bring them to a...