mtb-timeline

production summary

Production numbers are often guesswork, especially as mass production moved to Asia and the world moved to riding off road.


Year	1970s				1980s											1990s
Year	6	7	8	9	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	0	1	2	3
Total Production	1	10	60	200	500	2,000	15,000 ¹⁾	200,000	1,000,000²⁾	2,500,000³⁾	6,000,000	30,000,000	50,000,000 ⁴⁾	55,000,000	60,000,000	60,000,000⁵⁾	60,000,000	60,000,000

2022/02/02 16:08 · mtbtimeline

Worldwide Bicycle Production

Mountain bikes drove an 80's boom in bicycle sales. Graph from: campagnolodelta

US Bike sales from 1981→2005.
Mt. bikes were 10% of US sales in 1984 and doubled to 20% of US sales by 1985.⁶⁾ bicycleretailer

¹⁾

Early US production numbers went up by a factor of 10 each year: The Birth of Dirt (3rd ed.) by Frank J. Berto.

²⁾

According to The Dancing Chain by Frank Berto, page 246, 1M mt. bikes were sold in 1984.

³⁾

Late production numbers from booksc.org “From Marin County's Seventies Clunker to the Durango World Championship 1990: A History of Mountain Biking in the USA”, by Savre, Frédéric, Saint-Martin, Jean, Terret, Thierry, August 2010. This source counted 550,000 mt. bikes sold only in the US.

⁴⁾

Mountain bikes drove a doubling of world wide bike sales during the 1980's to a peak of 110 million in 1988, of which 50% were mountain bikes, or at least 50 million. By 1990, mt. bikes were 65% of the market, or roughly 60 million. Sources: https://www.ibike.org/library/statistics-data.htm, https://ur.booksc.org/book/51351438/a06749.

⁵⁾

Bike sales plateaued during the early 90's before crashing in 1998.

⁶⁾

See https://www.cyclepublishing.com/cyclingbooks/dc.html7The Dancing Chain by Frank Berto, page 248