Video: Welcome to the 2022 Value Bike Field Test – Reasonably Priced Full-Suspension

Remember that one time we reviewed a $9,000 trail bike and it really disappointed us? Yeah, me neither. It turns out that when you throw a bunch of fancy parts at a fancy frame, the finished product is also fancy and probably doesn’t suck, which sometimes leaves us with not much to say beyond stale platitudes and trivial criticisms about cable routing or chainstay protection.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: hardtails can be a lot of fun, but I suspect that most of us would prefer to be riding a full-suspension bike most of the time. The holdup for some is that while they certainly can give you more comfort, traction, and speed compared to only having front suspension, the extra moving bits also mean more money, weight, and complexity. Those are less of a concern if you’re okay spending big bucks, but it’s a different story if your budget tops out at $3,500 USD or less as ours did with our five full-suspension trail bikes. Plenty to talk about in our upcoming reviews, then.

Want to get a mountain bike but don’t have a ton of money to spend? While full-suspension rigs made nearly entirely out of carbon fiber get most of the headlines, hardtails offer a simpler, and therefore less expensive, way to get into riding. And because you’re not paying for the extra engineering, material, and all those pivots, they often sport an impressive spec sheet that a similarly priced dual-suspension bike can’t even get close to.

But they’re not just for budget bikers, either, as those who can’t get through a season of riding without cracking yet another set of chainstays, destroying another set of bearings, or blowing yet another shock might have better luck – and less time off the bike – by choosing a hardtail.

By “choose,” what I really mean to say is, “Please, just send us any bike that you have in stock.” If you’ve tried to buy yourself a new ride anytime over the last few years, or even just parts of a bike, you already know that you’re more likely to stumble onto the Ark of the Covenant than the 12-speed chain and derailleur you were actually looking for. Even so, Kazimer somehow sweet-talked his way into getting five full-suspension bikes that retail for $3,500 USD or well under, and four hardtails that come in at $2,100 USD or less.

Yes, a couple more bikes would have been good. Yes, some of the prices have gone up after the fact. And yeah, Kazimer can be downright enchanting when he wants to be, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell him how disappointed you are that he wasn’t able to get the exact bike you wanted – needed – to see reviewed at this Field Test.

This is our tenth Field Test, and that’s not even including all the trips Kazimer and I did over the years before we had a name for them, so we’ve got the testing process on lock by this point. It’s not complicated: head out for a short test lap and then do another. Then do another, and another, and then a bunch more. After we’ve done that, we head out for some test laps before heading out for some test laps after we get back from doing test laps. Then, after we’ve returned, we go for a few more la… Okay, you get the point; nothing beats short, repeatable laps on a course that suits whatever kind of bikes we’re riding.

That back-to-back testing is key because it lets us compare, er, comparable bikes far better than if we were riding them in isolation, and it highlights standout differences in geometry, suspension performance, and the bikes’ specs. Just don’t call it a shootout, alright?

All those laps wouldn’t count for much if the trails were more pumptrack than singletrack. But on the same hand, as much as we like to look like we know what we’re doing in photos of us riding sketchy terrain, none of these reasonably priced bikes were made for do-or-die lines. In reality, they need to be ridden on singletrack that matches their intentions, which I’d argue is light to medium duty trail riding with some rough stuff thrown in for good measure.

And that’s exactly what Tucson served up for us; undulating trails with a mix of tricky, low-speed climbs and fast, rough descents, all of which were paved in pointy rocks and either all the traction or none of the traction to keep us on our toes. It was mostly smooth…