19/09/2026
so, what’s next for the road bike?
there are so many possible categories of road bike right now: race bike, endurance bike, aero bike, all-road bike, urban/commuter/wet-weather bike.
with the surging popularity of the “do-it-all” or double-duty gravel bike, maybe the industry should take a harder look at what the average road rider actually wants from their bike.
we think there’s a new category of road frame quietly gaining legs.
we’ve coined it: aero endurance.
aero tube shapes sculpted by wind tunnel, geometry built by forums and community consensus.
high stack. y-bars. steep seat angle. lower bottom bracket. bigger tyre clearances.
basically, all the things that happen when you stop designing a bike around professional road racing and start designing one around how people actually want to ride.
because yeah, you want to go fast.
so the frame needs to be aero.
but you also want to shoehorn the biggest road tyre you can fit in there for comfortmaxxing.
you want to ride fast morning bunchies, but also take the bike paths on the evening commute home. there’s a random stretch of gravel you like to chop, but you don’t really need a gravel bike for it.
you want UDH. you want removable braze-ons in case you decide to experiment with 1x XPLR. but you also want to be able to throw a 2x Di2 groupset back on when R9300 finally arrives.
you accept that you probably need to sit a little more upright so you can ride 100km+ without your back, neck and hands filing a formal complaint.
but you don’t want the bike to look like you’ve given up.
that’s the important bit.
aero endurance isn’t about making an endurance bike faster.
it’s about asking whether an endurance bike needs to look like an endurance bike in the first place.
the modern road rider doesn’t necessarily want maximum race-bike aggression or maximum gravel-bike versatility.
they want the meme bike.
a bike that can do almost everything, goes stupid fast on the road, fits comically large tyres, has progressive geometry that ticks all the boxes... and still looks like something you’d want to post on instagram.
what features do you need for your next bike?
