From BikeRadar.com
By Warren Rossiter
I’ve tested more than a dozen gravel bikes over the past year and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that we’ve never had it so good
I’ve been testing a huge number of gravel bikes over the last 12 months, culminating in our Gravel Bike of the Year victor – Parlee’s epically capable Taos.
Above all, thousands of miles of testing have shown that, unlike in years past, gravel design has now evolved to the point where no matter what sort of gravel rider you are, there’s now a superb bike out there for you – and at all price levels, too.
Gravel is still a relatively new category. We only started seeing the growth of gravel bikes in the mid-2010s.
Yes, we’d had outliers before: Salsa’s Fargo, Genesis’s original Croix de Fer, and Specialized’s Tricross, but it wasn’t until 2014 when GT unveiled its original Grade (though labelled as an ‘endurance’ all-road bike at the time) that gravel started to get taken seriously by the biggest brands.
Image courtesy of Parlee Cycles