5 Titan gravel bikes on test: Off-road racers for eternity - or at least for many years to come

These are the 5 Titan gravel bikes

• Poison Mescaline Titan Gravel
• 8bar centre TI
• Chirp Chirp Lark
• Kocmo Daytona RS
• Triban GRVL 900

Particularly on a gravel bike, which is often used in harsh conditions such as dust, mud and rockfall and where the risk of a fall is higher than on a road bike, painted frames made of steel, aluminium or carbon often show the first signs of wear after a short time. An unpainted titanium frame, on the other hand, is largely spared such signs of wear. Even if it is damaged once, it can usually be polished out again with little effort.

A good gravel bike should also be robust, durable, light and comfortable. Titanium could be the perfect material for the frame in terms of robustness and durability, as it is considered the most resistant material for bicycle frames. The key to this durability lies not in the material itself, but in the fact that titanium frames usually have no paint that can be damaged. As titanium does not corrode or age, these gravel bikes do not need a protective paint finish that would be susceptible to scratches.

So we took a look in the lab to see whether titanium wheels offer any other advantages over wheels made from other materials and for whom it's worth turning to the precious metal.

Titanium gravel bikes: beautiful, but heavy and not very comfortable

Titanium is the ideal material for a hard-wearing gravel bike, as it hardly shows any damage even when subjected to harsh treatment. However, you should not expect particularly light or comfortable bikes. On a positive note, small suppliers are coming onto the market with innovative ideas and prices for entry-level bikes are falling. Nevertheless, titanium is still quite expensive compared to aluminium and carbon.

It turns out that the assumption that titanium produces particularly light frames is not true. This applies in particular to the more sturdily constructed gravel bikes. Our test frames generally weigh around 1800 grams without attachments. Although this makes them 10 to 20 percent lighter than comparable steel frames, even inexpensive aluminium frames achieve this weight without any problems. High-quality aluminium frames can even weigh significantly less and be even cheaper.

However, very low weight can come at the expense of stiffness. However, the 5 gravel bikes in our test are all reassuringly stiff, but also weigh accordingly - the heavy weight champions are the Chirp Chirp and Triban. They weigh around two kilos.

And the price of titanium gravel bikes?

The heavy frames mean that the bikes cannot be built much lighter, even with expensive (i.e. lightweight) components. Even with a lot of effort, titanium gravel bikes can hardly be made lighter than 9 kilos. For comparison: mass-produced carbon gravel bikes in the (relatively low) price range of around 3000 euros also weigh 9 kilos. For road bikes with titanium frames, the scales go down to a maximum of 8 kilograms.

After initially being a little disappointed by the weight, we were soon sobered by the fact that the frame material is not as comfortable as is often claimed. Our comparisons show that all gravel bikes offer an average level of comfort at best; compared to modern carbon bikes, many are even significantly harder. Endurance bikes with carbon frames in particular usually perform very well in terms of comfort at the rear of the bike. However, this is less important for gravel bikes, as the wide tyres provide a lot of cushioning anyway.

The test results of the Titan gravel bikes

If you look at the clear facts, the price-performance ratio of titanium bikes is not particularly good, although access to this precious material has now become cheaper than before thanks to inexpensive frames from Asia. But the enthusiasm for titanium cannot be explained by figures alone. Anyone who values their bike because it still looks like it did on the first day, even after a long time, will probably accept the higher price or the additional weight.

The sub-scores from 4.0 are in red, so you can see which bikes are out of the question for you due to weaker individual scores.

*LL = for life, CR = crash replacement, RA = racing exclusion