The Mountain bike is an industrial artform, and has very diverse influences from motorcycles and aeronautics to metallurgy and sculpture.
There appears to be no limit to the speed or type of terrain that mountain bikers strive for, and each successive evolution is achieved in the most part by advances in technology.
With time emerging manufacturing capabilities will bring many new design concepts within the financial reach of the average consumer.
Through the 1980s and 90s the sport benefited from the excess production capacity of the very large Japanese bike industry and cheap Taiwanese labour.
The exploding market of the mountain bike gave the Japanese suppliers an opportunity to innovate, which gave them the edge over European builders that dominated the bike market for decades.
At the same time the West Coast aerospace industry in America was declining which left hundreds of engineers with plenty of time on their hands and many began seeking work in the bike industry which could take advantage of their skills in materials and machinery.
This new wave of entrepreneurship led to better and cheaper components and concepts.
As the sport of mountain biking grew, more start-up capital became available, and people found new ways to make a living doing the thing that they loved, as a result mountain bikes became lighter, gained front and rear suspensions, and acquired more gears.
The state-of-the-art today is one of continued innovation, increased consolidation and commercialisation.
There have been sweeping technological changes that were designed to sell more and more products, and a cheaper price.
However, off-road biking remains one of the purest and most accessible expressions of cycling technology available to consumers.