Shimano wants to make your bike as smart as your car

I&#x27;m not sure who&#x27;s seriously interested in most of these features, fun factor nonwithstanding. One of bicycles&#x27; strengths is simplicity of critical elements, notably the gear switching. How do they make sure that the electronic system doesn&#x27;t die on the rider when the battery goes flat? How do they deal with increasing slack in the lines?<p>Who really benefits from turn signals? Unless they are mounted on special stalks, it&#x27;s going to be difficult to understand them anyway.<p>Other ideas are somewhat useful, like the car detector, or adjustable lights - I already thought about relating headlight power to speed or ambient light in 2011 (shameless plug: when I started working on Jazda - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhn.github.io&#x2F;jazda" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhn.github.io&#x2F;jazda</a> ). But the power benefits of that may still balance out with the additional electronics needed.

Anything you strap to a bike has to be reliable. If there is one thing you can say about mechanical systems it is that we know how to design them so they last the lifetime of a bike (wear parts excluded), anything electrical or electromechanical will have a shorter life than the equivalent that uses only mechanical parts. Just look at your average bicycle light set, even after I don&#x27;t know how long we <i>still</i> can&#x27;t make a set that lasts more than a couple of years.<p>The key to mechanical longevity is maintenance, a bit of oil and a bit of care and this stuff will last a lifetime. How many electronics bits and pieces do you know or do you have that have lasted &gt; 20 years? &gt; 30 years?<p>Case in point a friend has a Shimano bike with electric shifters. Super nice bike, but super fragile. One trainride and a very thin and fragile cable got lodged in the gears.<p>Several long hours of work later I have it working again (this only happened last week), oh, and never mind the $45 crappy little cable with custom plugs which gets plugged into an in-frame patch panel that is just about impossible to get to. I don&#x27;t see any advantage over my mechanical stuff, in fact I see a significant disadvantage. Electronics and bicycles don&#x27;t mix well unless you are prepared to make things bullet proof and that will price them right out of the market. So I don&#x27;t see this as a viable path, a novelty, something on very high end bikes but not something that will stand the test of time.

Unlike others on this thread, I love where this is headed. I&#x27;d love to have a really smart bike.<p>However, once I have that much tech on a bike, it would be impossible to park it anywhere without the risk of being stolen.

The grumpy old man in me likes my bike to be as mechanical as possible, I don&#x27;t want to remember to charge my shifters, power meter, gps, etc. Maybe that&#x27;s why I still ride a 1989 Trek 1200 with down tube shifters and biopace chain rings.

The bike is the most elegant mechanical systems in history, elevating humans from earth&#x27;s least efficient creatures to it&#x27;s most efficient.<p>Electronic shifting and other boondoggles completely undermine the reliability, elegance and simplicity of bikes.<p>I&#x27;ve fixed my bike while on the side of a mountain a hundred miles from home and ridden home.<p>What happens when my derailleur firmware crashes?

Bicycles are one of the few remaining non-trivial, non-electric machines that ordinary people use.<p>I&#x27;d prefer to leave them alone.<p>Seriously, I have a hard time thinking of many machines that fit that description.

Lots of negativity in here. Most bikes with DuraAce components already aren&#x27;t the sort of thing you&#x27;d leave out on a city street unattended.<p>One cool thing that stood out to me was that these monitors will transmit data over ANT+ or Bluetooth. As someone who already tracks all my workouts w&#x2F; a Garmin watch, I welcome the ability to track more metrics like power output. Gives you a good way to objectively track your progress over time when training for events and can help you gauge the impact of sleep, alcohol, etc on your performance.

I would like to see American magazines taking a more critical look at these lights. Like virtually all bike front lights sold in the USA, the Garmin UT800 has a circular beam, making it pretty much useless for anything. Proper bike lights have asymmetric projection beams that put the light on the road, not up into the sky. Unfortunately an American bicyclists who wants one of those lights is pretty much obligated to import one from Germany, where bicycle lighting is a matter of law. It seems really weird that these very bright, very expensive flashlights are the only thing available in US bike shops.

My (mid-previous-century, tech-free and entirely disconnected) bike is <i>already</i> way &quot;smarter&quot; than any modern &quot;device&quot;. Precisely because its overall (non-)complexity is an <i>exact</i> fit for the role it&#x27;s designed to perform. And, while <i>long</i> out of production, any reasonably competent bike mechanic on the planet can make expert repairs to, just from a quick visual inspection (and a catalog or two to order compatible parts from).

The Rearview Radar exists because of how terrible seeing behind you is on a bicycle. I ride a recumbent tricycle, and I simply have a mirror on the side which I can easily keep an eye on; due to my sitting position I conveniently behold the road before and behind me, unlike a road bike where it’s constant effort to do the same.<p>I really wish recumbent tricycles were more popular. The story of the exclusion of recumbents from races is rather sad.

Bicycle-building has replaced my obsession with building PCs. Unlike PCs, bike performance doesn&#x27;t follow Moore&#x27;s Law -- bikes make forty years ago, if kept in decent condition, are still going to be better bikes than a new bike purchased at Walmart or Target.<p>I&#x27;m old-fashioned, but I generally want able-bodied folks to get on the saddle if they can, whether it&#x27;s an old clunker or a new e-bike. Shimano makes amazing electronic components, but what about the cheap competitors that start flooding the market with integrated parts that break? Will bikes be salvageable and maintainable beyond that point? Are we going to get into a planned obsolescence situation here?

I live in Shenzhen. We moved from Yunnan about six months ago. Yunnan is one of the best places for cycle touring on earth: huge mountains, beautiful forests, great roads, little traffic, camping available but not required, plenty of people who can help you resolve mechanical issues for change. My mountain bike - XTR Shimano components, no lights or electronics at all - is literally in a shipping box, and the comments on this article have inspired me to re-assemble it this weekend.<p>On another note I&#x27;m planning to take a cycle touring trip through Mizoram in far eastern India over Chinese New Year, probably for around three weeks. Anyone crazy enough to want to join? :)

Dunno if Shimano is ever going to live down BioPace. At the same time I’m glad clever people kept at it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;absoluteblack.cc&#x2F;oval-104bcd-chainring.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;absoluteblack.cc&#x2F;oval-104bcd-chainring.html</a>

I love the idea of not having to replace my shifting cables&#x2F; adjusting them every few months however, the price is a huge deal for me. I ride my bike to work every day and while i did shell out 200$ for a new 105 crankset, I don&#x27;t want to have to pay too much more than that for lights&#x2F;shifting. Maybe a di2 version of the lower market shimano group sets would make that more feasible as a cyclist who doesn&#x27;t mind occasional maintenance

I&#x27;d rather have my car become as &quot;dumb&quot; as my bike.

Automatic lights would be amazing in ridesharing bike systems, like Nike&#x27;s Biketown that we have here in PDX: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biketownpdx.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biketownpdx.com&#x2F;</a><p>I see these fancy &quot;smart&quot; features very useful for making biking convenient and simple for very casual biking.<p>Hard core bikers already are happy for the most part, and probably only care about shaving off marginal amounts of weight.

None of this is particularly new, but it is being refined.<p>The R9170 Dura-Ace hydraulic system isn&#x27;t even complete yet, the power meter crankset is only starting to materialise.<p>Yet it does represent the 2nd proper generation of electronic shifting and hydraulic braking on road bikes.<p>None of what is in the article is new, but it is being polished and brought together better. One of the things that I have enjoyed is that with a Wahoo bike computer (or the forthcoming Hammerhead Android based computer), it&#x27;s now possible to grab your bike... go out and put in a long ride, and without any hassle or prep for your power, heart, cadence, and speed to all be recorded, accurately, auto-uploaded to Strava on your return, and during the ride the buttons on the Shimano R9170 hood can control the screen on the GPS, and the electronic shifting means tired hands on seriously long rides are far less of a problem.<p>This is now a reality, it&#x27;s there. That&#x27;s my daily steed.<p>That style of bike is also now the default choice of the endurance rider. They learned a few years ago of the benefits of all-weather braking that doesn&#x27;t fade, electronic shifting to spare the hand.<p>The fear of flat batteries within Di2 is just not there. If you top up every few months... you&#x27;ll be fine. You&#x27;d need to be doing events like the TransAm or Transcontinental and training on the bike and failing to charge... to even stand a chance at experiencing a flat battery.<p>Re: the accident alert in the Garmin, I tried a See Sense rear lamp that has this feature and it&#x27;s pointless. Nothing more than a headline grabber. Far better on lighting just to buy something with a solid bright red light that operates on bog standard AAA batteries and is cheap, my favourite being the GBP 15 Moon Pulsar. For front light I favour Lumicycle, but for rear give me super reliable and easy to find batteries for.<p>This stuff is all very nice. It&#x27;s currently top dollar for the Dura-Ace end of the range, but is available in cheaper groupsets, and is also starting to emerge with the Alfine internal hub gear systems. Meaning: It is moving down the range and becoming common.<p>Cycles will also nearly all go power-assist. They too are maturing at a great rate, and even avid cyclists like myself who have ridden one is now tempted.<p>Cycles will go electric in all ways. The future is here.<p>If you&#x27;re interested, other recent changes in cycling:<p>+ Frames geometries are changing, the emergence of 3d printing is making bottom bracket and dropout clusters lighter, stronger and more capable<p>+ Tyres are fatter and lower pressure <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schwalbe.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;road-reader&#x2F;schwalbe-g-one-allround.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schwalbe.com&#x2F;gb&#x2F;road-reader&#x2F;schwalbe-g-one-allro...</a><p>+ Tyres are becoming tubeless, like car tyres, with puncture filling gloop to handle everything short of a side-wall failure (but then you can just insert a tube to get you home) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roadcyclinguk.com&#x2F;gear&#x2F;buyers-guide-go-tubeless.html#eMCvFPxI2fIo4Cup.97" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roadcyclinguk.com&#x2F;gear&#x2F;buyers-guide-go-tubeless.html...</a><p>+ Wheels are getting wider whilst still being aero, and accommodating aero with fatter tyres, helped by disc brakes (allows rims, forks and frames to evolve). Check out Enve SES AR 4.5 wheels <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enve.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ses-4-5-ar&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enve.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;ses-4-5-ar&#x2F;</a><p>+ Disc brakes are changing frames so that axles are thru-frame for quick and easy wheel changes and consistent brake alignment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyclingtips.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;road-bikes-are-headed-towards-through-axels-but-why&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyclingtips.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;road-bikes-are-headed-toward...</a><p>+ Gravel bikes are the new road bikes, striking a balance between cyclocross and road they are adventure or &quot;super versatile&quot; bikes that are fast and have the potential to take a gravel trail occasionally <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;road.cc&#x2F;content&#x2F;buyers-guide&#x2F;217893-18-best-2017-gravel-adventure-bikes-%E2%80%94-super-versatile-bikes-are-home" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;road.cc&#x2F;content&#x2F;buyers-guide&#x2F;217893-18-best-2017-grav...</a><p>+ Bike bags are moving from panniers to under saddle and on the bar, check out Apidura for examples of this. Bike-packing is very on-trend right now <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apidura.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apidura.com&#x2F;</a><p>+ Riding is changing from sportif to weekend and overnight, and clothing is changing too into lightweight and adaptive wear, Rapha Brevet range is an example of this, especially their insulated gilet and jacket <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rapha.cc&#x2F;gb&#x2F;en&#x2F;shop&#x2F;brevet&#x2F;category&#x2F;brevet" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rapha.cc&#x2F;gb&#x2F;en&#x2F;shop&#x2F;brevet&#x2F;category&#x2F;brevet</a><p>+ Most anticipated new product is probably the Hammerhead computer. Garmin is tolerated and not loved, Wahoo is pretty good but not yet feature complete <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dcrainmaker.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;wahoo-elemnt-gps-bike-computer-in-depth-review.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dcrainmaker.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;wahoo-elemnt-gps-bike-co...</a> , but the Hammerhead could be excellent and they have the potential to move into Android Wear with some actually excellent apps too <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hammerhead.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hammerhead.io&#x2F;</a><p>There is nothing in cycling not currently undergoing rapid change. This is an industry overhauling itself to grow it&#x27;s market by having vehicles and equipment to allow human-assisted transport to be easy, go faster, go farther, be more comfortable, more practical, more lifestyle. This stuff is currently top-end, but it&#x27;s already moving down and becoming more accessible.

The tech is cool and all but I&#x27;ll stick with my DuraAce 7400 with down-tube shifters.<p>I do want the rear radar!!

Technology is cool and all, and the Shimano setup is drool worthy. But... I really worry that when it comes to racing, we&#x27;re creeping away from the manual, purely mechanical tradition of cycling. Safety I can understand, but adding electricity and computers I just can&#x27;t get used to. Perhaps I&#x27;m a young Luddite.

If a bike needs battery replacement, you&#x27;re doing it wrong.

no, they want to make my bike as smart as someone who bought a lot nicer car than me. it&#x27;s <i>already</i> easier to change gears on my bike than my car.

Why?

I have a Tesla (2016 Model S, AP2), and let me just say: Can we set the bar a little higher? :-)

&gt;this is the future of bikes, where computer, components, and lights work as one to improve the ride.<p>oh god. no.

&quot;It&#x27;s reminiscent of a modern car, where you can control all the critical vehicle functions from a few buttons on the steering wheel.&quot;<p>So, one then? The horn?<p>&quot;Critical&quot; clearly means something different to someone tricking-out a push bike with thousands of dollars of marginally useful kit.