Chinese X-LAB AD9 aero road bike as used by Astana on cycling's WorldTour now for sale to the public at £2,553 for the frameset

Cannondale are made in Taiwan and Vietnam, I thought?

My cannondale SuperSix gen3 frameset i recently bought has a sticker saying: made in China. Dont know about the newest models.

What you say about consumer rights or warranty may or may not be true, although as/if these bikes become popular that will doubtless change if UK retailers start selling them. However, there is no reason to assume that just because it's from China it's going to fail, I haven't noticed huge numbers of Astana riders suffering broken frames, have you? XDS have for some years been making open mould frames used by minor but well-known brands such as Planet X, it's unlikely as they are attempting to establish their name in the west that they would drop at least the quality control standards they use for those. There are numerous moral and ethical questions to be addressed about our appetite for Chinese goods but there's no denying that they produce some extremely good stuff, I think we need to get past the assumption that everything made in China is going to be tat.

open_roads wrote:

It's a steal for a product that may not have any enforceable consumer rights or warranty and no legally enforceable obligations on the manufacturer to provide a safe product that meets relevant standards.

It's cheap right up to the point it fails and you're looking at £000s in emergency dental treatment.

This is prejudiced scare-mongering nonsense. In the past decade I have bought multiple frames, rims and components direct from Chinese suppliers and have had a good experience with all of those items. I spend less money and I get bikes that are highly personalised to me. None of the frames or other items have failed in any unexpected way nor have they been of noticeably less quality than name brands in shops. I don't expect much in the way of warranty although customer service can be quite responsive, there again I haven't spent big money on anything.

My dental bills are real but that's nothing to do with cycling ... and everything to do with a Scottish upbringing.

Agreed. The likes of Trace Velo on YT are showing that Chinese kit can be both excellent VFM and that there is after-sales service. I'm old enough to remember when we would classify anything made in Japan as cheap junk. It's just the same prejudice a few decades on. 

AndyPara wrote:

Why the need to say "Chinese" in the headline? None of your recent posts include the nationality of a brand apart from this one...

Because it's a completely new brand that most readers won't have heard of, it's a safe assumption that there is no need to say "American brand Specialized" or "Italian brand Colnago" but in the case of a new entry to the market… I'm sure I've seen plenty of headlines with "New British brand enters market" and so on.

In any case, who's to say that what works for their 'aerodynamic engineering team' is still going to work for us normal unaerodynamic folks?

It appears that the bars and seatpost are included. Can't help you on the BB nor the tyre clearance.

The bars are included although they are apparently 400 mm in all sizes which won't suit everybody. From a recent picture (below) of Astana's African champion Henok Mulubrhan's bike it looks as though tyre clearance will be what is technically known as "plenty". 

Rendel Harris wrote:

The bars are included although they are apparently 400 mm in all sizes which won't suit everybody. From a recent picture (below) of Astana's African champion Henok Mulubrhan's bike it looks as though tyre clearance will be what is technically known as "plenty". 

I dunno, once you've put mudguards on, not sure you'll get more than 28mm

Miller wrote:

AI text incoming! "Our aerodynamic engineering team meticulously optimized the frame’s streamlined design." I have grown to detest AI text as I see it a lot in my day job. Words like 'meticulous' are a giveaway, as if you couldn't tell anyway.

To be fair to AIs, a Large Language Model will only output such meaningless word-salad because it was trained on the soulless drivel that marketing people have been writing for decades.

Although you're right that AI in general will soon start eating its own tail, as new LLMs are trained on the output of previous LLMs, quickly degenerating to something like "Meticulous Aero Optimium Smooth" and finally just repeating the word "Penis" over and over again, forever.