It’s hard to say when the bike industry reached peak fat bike, but judging by news stories from the Singletracks archives, it seems to have happened around 2015.
It was at Interbike in 2015 that we profiled 22 brand new fat bikes that had been released that year, up from the 15 models we counted in 2014. Everyone from small, boutique bike brands to the major players either already had or had just introduced a fat bike to their lineup. At the same time, brands dedicated almost exclusively to fat biking were being established as well, swelling the number of models to choose from. In fact, the whole scene was not unlike what we’re seeing with gravel bikes today.
We decided to check in and see what the fat bike class of 2015 is up to and found 11 of the 22 bikes introduced that year are no longer in production. A 50% decline appears to be pretty steep, yet as it turns out, there isn’t a singular explanation as to what happened. As they say, it’s complicated.
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