The cycling industry is full of curiosities – little mysteries born from the minds of product managers and marketing departments in a bid to produce better stuff and sell more of it. Some of those mysteries are mechanical; some of them are aesthetic. And there’s one gnawing little inconsistency that, once you notice it, will really start doing your head in (if you let it). It is this: model numbers.
Now, model names are one thing – some of them come from acronyms (Giant’s TCR = Total Compact Road, for example), some from places (Trek’s Madone, named after the benchmark Col de la Madone climb in the south of France), and some from how special they are supposed to be (Bianchi’s extremely special Specialissima). But more often than not, those names are trailed by a sequence of other things to differentiate between models.
There are a few schools of thought behind this: many brands lean on the level of componentry equipped on a bike as a qualifier, which at face value is useful in differentiating models (a consumer knows they’re getting an Ultegra-equipped bike, say) but quickly introduces inconsistencies of its own (… but it has a 105 cassette?). Worse, it encourages consumers to make purchase decisions on a relatively unimportant metric – for the best return on investment, the most useful guidance is arguably to target the best frame within your budget first, wheels second, and groupset third.
But at least naming a bike by its groupset level is (usually) internally consistent: consumers generally have an awareness of the various Shimano or SRAM hierarchies. But if you’re shopping between different brands, you’ll soon find yourself encountering long model names packed with information and trailed by a number.
And it’s not like those numbers make all that much sense. Some brands count down to 0, like Giant. Others count up. Focus has a 9.8 and 9.9, but no 9.7 or 10. So who came up with these number schemes? Who decided that a 9.9 is another brand’s 0, or another brand’s 1? Why do some brands skip even numbers and just use odd numbers? Is it too much to ask for a little consistency, and if not, what the hell is going on?
These aren’t big questions that will make a big difference, but like I said: if you think about it enough it’ll bother you. So – more as an attempt to understand the lay of the land rather than to change it – we reached out to a bunch of different brands to try to get them to explain what they call things, and why they call them that (if they even know).
Decimal points
German brand Focus is prominent in not just having a number chasing the model name, but decimal points thereafter – and it’s an attempt to simplify things rather than obfuscate them. First comes the frame model, like the brand’s race road bike, the Izalco Max. After that come the numbers: “All Focus bikes are labelled with two numbers, which are divided by a dot,” a representative from PON – Focus’ parent company – told Escape. “The number in front of the dot represents the frame material and its quality. The number behind the dot represents the spec level. Carbon is always the highest number with 9 being the highest quality layup and 8 being a regular carbon layup. Aluminium bikes start from 7 and below.”
That’s all well and good – and quite succinctly explained – but then logic seems to go out the window. The range-topping model is the Izalco Max 9.0, equipped with SRAM Red AXS, which is trailed by the Izalco Max 9.9 (Shimano Dura Ace Di2), 9.8 (Ultegra Di2) and 9.7 (SRAM Rival AXS). Two gripes here: 9.0 is a lower number than 9.9 (it’s how Focus names ‘limited edition’ bikes, apparently), and secondly, what happens if Focus decides it wants to introduce a SRAM Force AXS model? Is that a 9.75, or do they slot it into the lineup at 9.6 (below a bike equipped with a lesser groupset)?
Does your head hurt yet? Good, because now we’re heading to Trek.
Model > frame material > spec level > generation
Trek has gone to some pains on its website to explain why it names its bike models the way that it does, which is useful – but it’s also necessary, because there’s a lot to unpack.
Take, for instance, the current range-topping Madone SLR 9 AXS Gen 8. There’s a heap of information within that: Madone, the model name. SLR, the grade of carbon (which, according to another page on the website, itself has three different grades: 900, 800 and, erroneously, 500). The 9, which tells you that you’re dealing with the top tier of componentry (SRAM Red AXS, in this case – the Dura Ace Di2 model is simply a Madone SLR 9 Gen 8). And the ‘Gen 8’, which tells you that this is the eighth version of the Madone frameset since it was brought to the market.
But the word soup gets more confusing when you navigate to another page that tells you that the 900 and 800 tiers of SLR carbon (which is also known as ‘OCLV’ – Optimum Compaction Low Void) sit alongside a 500 grade ‘SL’ tier, as well as the aluminium ALR (aka 300 Alpha) and AL (aka 100 Alpha) frame levels. This sets up a theme consistent across the Trek range – numbers skipped seemingly at random (at least for now – there has previously been a 200 Alpha).
This continues on the componentry side of the Trek naming convention, which skips from level 9 (Dura Ace Di2/Red AXS) to level 7 (Ultegra Di2/Force AXS). Numbers then run down to level 2 (Shimano Claris); there is no level 1.
Now throw it in reverse
Taiwanese bike manufacturing titan, Giant (and its sister company Liv), also uses a system of model names, frame tier, and a number chasing it all – but rather than a high number representing the best, the scale is reversed. Bikes with a 0 are the flagship in a given range (e.g. Giant TCR Advanced Pro 0), typically followed by models ending with 1 and 2. “This approach aligns with perceived value and retail price, ensuring an intuitive order from top-tier to more accessible options,” a Giant representative told Escape. “Lower-tier models (e.g. 3 or beyond) may only be stocked selectively, so naming higher-end bikes with lower numbers makes sense since these models are widely represented.”
There are, in Giant’s view, multiple reasons that this system works best, allowing flexibility for retailers (letting local distributors opt for lower-tier models if it suits the market) without undermining the more widely-established higher-end models. It also “allows for future expansion without naming constraints,” Giant said. “Starting with a ‘0’ at the top means we can introduce additional models without boxing in the range.”
Giant’s system also sidesteps the issue of directly tying a number to a particular groupset, as is the case elsewhere, but more nebulously reflects “[Giant’s] efforts to balance perceived value and market opportunities” – something that Giant says “provides consistency in offering intuitive options for different riders’ needs.”
“Admittedly, there’s no perfect naming structure, and other brands like Trek take a different approach,” a representative told Escape. “For Giant, however, the current system has proven effective in supporting retailer scalability, product expansion, and consumer understanding over the years.”
An industry-wide hodgepodge
From Giant’s long-established ‘lowest number wins’ hierarchy, we enter the realms of internal inconsistency stretching back for decades. Cannondale – which provided a lengthy and refreshingly honest history of its naming conventions – has tried just about everything when it comes to differentiating between models. “There is no simple, straightforward response,” as the company’s ‘sage’ Murray Washburn put it. Cannondale has tried a range of letters, numbers, and special-edition names (like the M800 ‘Beast of the East’) “just to keep things spicy”.
Early in the company’s history, numbers went up by hundreds, and then thousands (SM1000, SR2000) before an abrupt pivot around 2005 to a “reverse single number hierarchy of 1 being the best”. But wait, there’s more: “some platforms stuck with the traditional ascending 300, 400, 1000 etc. while others in the same model year were the new 1,2,3 set-up,” Washburn told Escape. “The exact reasons for switching are lost to the mists of memory, but mostly it was a desire to shorten and simplify, give the new bikes a fresh feel, and move away from the past. Forgive us, we were adjusting to new ownership after our brief foray into bankruptcy,” he quipped.
Within a few years the reverse single number hierarchy had become established company-wide, before the growing sophistication of the company’s carbon fibre offerings – and introduction of a top-tier new ‘HiMod’ designation – meant that a new descriptor made its way into the lineup by 2009 (e.g. SuperSix Hi-MOD 1).
By 2011, SRAM’s arrival in the groupset space meant that another new descriptor came in, with Cannondale specifying the groupset as well as frame model, frame tier and number in the road hierarchy – a system that persisted until the late 2010s, when numbers were dropped entirely in favour of groupset because the length of model names was getting “long and confusing” (e.g. Synapse Hi-MOD Disc 1 Dura-Ace Di2). The CAAD series of road bikes is a notable exception – a neatly rising sequence of bikes disrupted by a jump from the CAAD10 to the CAAD12 (the reason why, it is speculated, is the spoken similarity between ‘CAAD11’ and ‘Cadel Evans’).
Another pivot came in 2022 when Cannondale switched from groupset to numbers again: “We realized the road names were getting to be too much of a mouthful and dropped the component group name and went back to SuperSix EVO Hi-MOD 1, 2, etc.,” Washburn said. “Currently, we are evaluating that decision – trying to balance simplicity with the SEO value of including those group names.”
Balancing priorities
While Cannondale is notable in having tried almost every model naming strategy across its long time in the industry, there are still some approaches that it hasn’t. Frameset-only manufacturers (like Ritchey) can keep model names consistent across the long tenure of their product cycles – a Road Logic has been in the lineup for decades, with permutations differentiated by the year of an update (I ride a 2018 Road Logic, for example) or the braking system (rim or disc).
There are also companies like Specialized which have tiers that aren’t numerical, but a series of names: Sport, Comp, Expert, Elite, Pro and so on. That makes sense in some ways – it doesn’t hinge on groupset – but it’s a tricky memory exercise to slot those arbitrary names into a relative position in the lineup (Specialized did not provide further clarification on its approach). And even Specialized isn’t immune to a numerical hierarchy in its carbon fibre products – its top-tier S-Works frames currently use ‘12r’ carbon fibre; Specialized then skips 11 on its way down to ‘10r’ and ‘9r’.
But while there’s something undeniably irksome about the hodge-podge of numbers and letters that categorise cycling products, it’s reassuring to learn that there’s not some malevolent attempt to make things tricky to understand, just because. It is, in the words of Cannondale’s Murray Washburn, “an ever-changing system, driven by many factors, some external and some self-inflicted … that’s one of the main reasons brands take so many different approaches.”
Naming things can be a bit of a mess – and if a consumer is comparing across brands, it gets messier still. But the mess is informed by a pure and noble ideal: “the goal is to have something that is memorable, easy to say, and help riders understand the value/performance hierarchy,” Washburn says. How successful the industry is at achieving that is a harder thing to define – but if we were to give it a score, we wouldn’t know where to start counting.
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