Today the Kona Bike Company fired shots across the bows of every other big player in the mountain bike game with their new Blast Tax. It’s an involuntary-partnership with their most well-heeled customers that will seed deserving mountain bike programs with their versatile, and high-value, offroad rig the Blast.
The pilot program is launching first in the USA, Canada, and Mexico with plans to put the ‘world’ in Kona World by involving all their offices and distributors by 2024. Effective immediately, North American purchasers of Kona’s carbon fibre mountain bike platforms (Process X, Process 134, and Hei Hei) will see the price of those bikes rise by $1000 USD to cover the cost of the Kona Blast Tax (KBT) program.
In addition to taking home their awesome new Kona mountain bike, the purchaser will be able to choose from a selection of worthy local organizations providing mountain bike opportunities to kids and adults to benefit from the Blast Tax. The organization of their choice will receive a Kona Blast hardtail with a pair of Wah Wah 2 composite pedals, a helmet from program supporter Bell Sports, a bottle cage, pump, and multi-tool from program supporter Lezyne, and a $200 cheque from the KBT program towards the cost of maintenance at their local Kona dealer.
When asked for comment on Kona’s exciting new program to support the world-wide mountain bike community, their largest competitors had a range of responses. Specialized noted that they own a wind tunnel and touted their radical new program to eliminate dealer margins and Cannondale announced that they would be offering the same bikes as last year in an exciting new limited edition Tinker Juarez retro-paint-scheme they had never, ever, ever, done before – 1993 Storm Klein Adroit.
Separately, Trek Bicycles announced their original new program the ‘Roscoe Rebate’ where purchasers of their carbon bikes will see an extra $900 come out of their pocket to cover the price of a Roscoe bike and a bunch of Bontrager accessories for a worthy mountain bike organization of their choosing.