I'm starting to get aero bike fatigue. Of course this isn't the fault of any particular brand. But it is reminiscent of the one-bike-to-rule-them-all Tarmac SL7 trends of 2020-2023. Everyone is trying to gain marketshare. I get it.
My current numbness makes me wanna sell everything, buy the latest Giant Propel, and call it day.
Man, I am with you. I feel like we are in a place where so many brands are going for aesthetic because testing is too hard and they get reviewers and press to recycle a n=1 observation as a universal truth.
For example, this "leading edge isn't aero," or the "less than UCI max deep tubes means they left watts on the table in exchange for weight." Did they? Unless they test it themselves or quote the designer, those are just aesthetic at best, slightly informed, aesthetic-based comments. Even if you take the time to reconstruct the profile and run CFD, you are still limited by the assumptions you made, rather than by a model informed by actual measurements on a test rig with your bike and a dummy. It becomes a case of bad data in, bad data out. But hey, the bike "holds speed" or is "cross wind stable" for the reviewer, so that's nice.
According to their own presentation,
Giant saved a whopping 1.2w on the frame for the new Propel. The rest of it was tires (6.2w), wheels (2.2w), and a narrower bar and resulting positional changes (~8.8w).
With so many of these Chinese-brand bikes, we see pretty upright, old-school (short-reach) geometries and integrated or highly proprietary bars. The Avenger follows that trend, basically becoming an endurance bike with the Y shaped bar.
How many position watts are you giving up vs. what you get back from the frame? Given that people DIYing their aero setups for roadbikes seem to be getting CDAs down from what was world-class a few years ago at 0.26x to 0.22x or even 0.20x, the frame's aero is pretty much irrelevant if you can't get the fit right as you are talking like 30 times or more greater impact from fit vs. one generation of aero bike to the next.
