It inevitably comes off a bit dickish when we experienced mountain bikers suggest to non-rider friends who want to get into the sport that they spend a minimum of $2,000 on a respectable mountain bike to get going. Few human-powered sports host the initial sticker shock that mountain biking does, so many beginners will go their own way on a minuscule budget, perhaps arriving in a big box retailer along a line of bikes selling for less than $500 and asking "What if?"
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Of course, us biker dicks would scoff at the idea of actually taking these "bikes" down any stretch of singletrack, but it's hard to deny that they pack everything a mountain bike is supposed to have. Ya know, rims, brakes, suspension, etc. So Seth from Seth's Bike Hacks took a $140 Mongoose Ledge be bought at Walmart and put it through the paces at the local bike park, finding that it can actually roll, corner, and jump without exploding.
Of course, these rides are not packing many of the fine features of today's mountain bikes, through axles being one of them, so they do have their limits. But they can, in fact, be ridden on the same trail a real mountain bike is supposed to go down–something of a revelation for those of us buying bikes as or more expensive as our cars.
Norm55
May 15th, 2016
Love this test. About time!
If this bike gets people off their sofas and outside it is well worth the $140. Plus if they get hooked on biking they will likely trade up to a better bike. My past experience with the cheap bikes is their very poor bearings and weak axles. Maybe the Mongoose is the one to get!