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Let me put it in programmer terms: you and I are like the 1% of browser users who open the developer tools. We exist, but to the larger bike industry the number

Let me put it in programmer terms: you and I are like the 1% of browser users who open the developer tools. We exist, but to the larger bike industry the number of people like us rounds to zero. You also fall into one of the (as far as I can tell) two groups that skew heavily towards caring about end-user maintainability: hard-core transportation cyclists (you, and to a much lesser extent me), and people who bike tour (me as well, though not recently)

kazinator 4y ago
Thanks to the recent proliferation of e-bikes, driven by battery tech improvements, many more people are looking at bikes as viable urban transportation. People who are relatively unfit, and would never commute on a human-powered bike, day in and day out, are zooming around town on these things, logging many miles. Maintenance issues are going to matter. People are not going to fork up two thousand dollars just to have the thing sitting in storage; they are looking to it to solve a transportation problem. Only the spoke-changing maintenance issue applies to hard-core DIY people; the remainder of the point is that the electric transmission likely requires next to zero maintenance. So for the non-DIY people who don't maintain bicycle drive trains themselves, this still means less downtime and expense. If a spoke is easier to change, that could make a difference to your bike shop visit: "sure, I have some time to do that within the next one to two hours" versus "I can have that ready by noon tomorrow".