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    What the heck is the difference? Marketing at its finest? BMC Roadmachine VS BMC URS AL ONE

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    8 Comments

    2. KiriABSC on

      Maximum tire width… urs fits bigger tires but apart from that …. You’re not wrong 😉

    3. sitdownrando-r on

      ~~Tire clearance.~~

      ~~The Roadmachine is more of an “all-road” bike. The URS is adventure gravel and can fit much larger tires.~~ I haven’t looked at the range (don’t care to) but I’d expect to see more road-oriented gearing being offered for the Roadmachine outside of the 1x option you’ve shared.

      I just looked up stated tire clearance and it’s 45mm for both. That’s interesting. I still expect the URS to have slightly more, but it would exceed the spec.

    4. ifuckedup13 on

      Same frame, different specs. One for gravel, one for “all road”. Why make two different frames? The Carbon ones are different.

    5. AteEYES on

      Looks like the URS has a higher bottom bracket and along with a shorter stem, More of a cross bike with more clearance for going over shit, but besides that they look similar, not marketing at its finest just different options for different use cases, casual rider wouldnt know the difference.

    6. Koppenberg on

      If you go to the BMC site and put the specs for each next to the other, you will see some very minor differences.

      Roadmachine has an Apex XPLR rear mech, the URS has Apex Eagle. The cassette ratios are different (11-44 vs 11-50), cranksets are different (42t vs 40t) the forks are technically different. The bars are different. Tires are different (32mm Expanse vs. 45mm Riddler).

      It all adds up to two very similar bikes, but one is aimed at endurance road and the other is aimed at gravel. The Roadmachine has higher gearing and narrower tires than the URS. The wheels are different as well (XRD-522 25mm for the Roadmachine and PRD-23 23mm for the URS.)

      My cursory inspection of the geometry numbers suggests the frames are identical, but I don’t actually know that. It looks like the same frame w/ all road parts vs gravel parts.

      is there a need to market two bikes so similar? <shrug> since the bikes ship from the factory w/ the group installed it is cheaper to sell two “different” bikes than it would be to swap parts out at the dealer. Will the specs be enough to matter to a novice rider? Maybe not.

    7. newcarscent104 on

      FWIW I have the base carbon URS and love it. I put a set of carbon wheels on it with some GK SK tires and now it’s a rocketship on all terrain.

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