7 ms·

> an era where e-bikes are a lot more like regular bikes: totally generic, interchangeable parts that don’t require any single manufacturer. I wouldn’t hold my

> an era where e-bikes are a lot more like regular bikes: totally generic, interchangeable parts that don’t require any single manufacturer. I wouldn’t hold my breath. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/02/can-we-make-bicycles-sustainable-again.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/02/can-we-make-bicycles...: “Until a few decades ago, component compatibility was a hallmark of bicycle manufacturing. My bicycles are a perfect example of this. Most components – such as wheels, gear set, and brakes – are interchangeable between the different frames, even though every vehicle is from another brand and year of construction. […] Unfortunately, compatibility is hardly a feature of bicycle manufacturing anymore. Manufacturers have introduced an increasing number of proprietary parts and keep changing standards, resulting in compatibility issues even for older bicycles of the same brand. For example, if the shifter of a modern bike breaks after some years of use, a replacement part will probably no longer be available. You need to order a new set from a new generation, which will be incompatible with your front and rear derailleur – which you also need to replace. For road bikes, the change from cassette bodies with ten sprockets (around 2010) to cassette bodies with eleven, twelve, and most recently thirteen sprockets have made many wheelsets obsolete, and the same goes for the rest of the drivetrain including shifters and chains. Disc brakes, which are now on almost every new bicycle, all have different axle designs, meaning that every vehicle now requires proprietary spare parts. Disc brakes also required new shifters, forks, framesets, cables, and wheels, making such bicycles incompatible with earlier designs.”

norir 3y ago
Yes. The other day I saw a modern looking bike with a chris king headset and I smiled. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a rogue group of manufacturers to essentially open source road bike designs and more or less freeze certain standards in the design (e.g. use threaded bottom brackets which are dramatically easier to maintain and give up little in _meaningful_ performance for most riders). Of course this would imply selling fewer bicycles to each individual consumer (though there would always be a need for replacement parts) so I'm sure the bike industry would hate such an idea.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Bikes have been 'open sourced' since the early 1900's. It is only now with the advent of e-bikes and ridiculously overpriced racing bikes that the 'closed source' model has entered the equation. Bikes as a service is a thing now. You don't even own your bike anymore... I bought a -cheap- beater for a family member a few weeks ago for the grand sum of $80. It is an excellent bike by a prime brand manufacturer, it needed a little bit of work (roller brake service, one new spoke, some grease and a new rear light) and it's as good as new. I fully expect it to outlive me, and probably everybody else in this house if it is taken care of as well. I regularly see bikes from the 60's around here that are still in very good shape. The bike industry lives by: theft, bike accidents, kids growing up (kids are really rough on bikes) and cracks in frames. Everything else is fixable if the bike is of a reputable brand. Crap bikes not so much those have the weirdest parts.
- switchbak 3y ago
  Chris King headsets are still a thing. The headset madness of the 2000's has mostly settled down, and 3rd party headsets are a pretty trivial and standards compliant upgrade. We're even mostly settled into a standard bearing size (!). Bottom brackets are an example where we're coming back to sanity. The pressfit junk they pushed on us was for ease of manufacturing and low cost. Consumers realized they were worse, and they started to avoid those. The manufacturers have caught on and started putting threaded BBs back in, as they ought to. We've mostly got a set of semi-reasonable standards. In the MTB world at least, 148 rear hub width is almost ubiquitous, and 15mm front axles with boost spacing are effectively it outside of downhill applications. 6 bolt rotors of various sizes are essentially standard. The majority of the pain is where the big manufacturers (SRAM and Shimano) are battling it out: hub and chain/shifting standards. That is admittedly painful right now, but you can chalk most that up to corporate greed. All in all, I don't get the concern here. With a little bit of consideration of compatibility in a couple areas you can mix and match brands pretty easily on most of the bike.
  - CobaltFire 3y ago
    I’ve been riding a PF30 BB since 2016 in all weather over thousands of miles and haven’t had a single creak. I will admit I do prefer a threaded BB, but I also think it’s an overstated issue. Then again, my frame is steel and I run a pretty high end Wheels Mfg BB. Maybe I’m insulated by that.
aidenn0 3y ago
Oh this is such a thing. The lack of compatibility also makes things less customizable. I used to always add a horizontal brake lever for reaching when I lift up from the drops (which I do when in traffic), but now that every shifter is different and every shifter is integrated into the brake levers it's not really an option. Somewhat unrelated I also kind of hate how popular aluminum has become (or at least was when I last bought a road bike). Since all the mass produced frames are aluminum, the only options for a steel frame were more exotic models and thus expensive. In retrospect I wish I had just bought a steel hybrid frame and built a bike myself, but I was rather busy at the time, and it probably still would have been more expensive since so many of the parts are non-interchangeable.
- CobaltFire 3y ago
  I ride a Niner RLT Steel (bought as a frame) for that exact reason. It was a tossup between that or a Lynsey, and I snagged a close out color of the Niner for 1/3 of the quoted price of the Lynsky at the time, and that included a carbon fork. I’m actually overhauling it now with an entire group set after riding the last one since 2016. Interesting fact that relates: the first couple years of the RLT Steel shipped with a fork that is 15x100 thru axle; nowadays the gravel/cyclocross market has settled on 12x100. So I ended up getting a set of New Old Stock (NOS) 29” wheels from that same era that are 15x100/12x142 and 22.5mm wide. Perfect for my bike, but vanishingly hard to find now as a set due to the oddball matchup.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Yeah, that frame costs more than my entire bike did. There were steel-framed options at the time, but the cheapest ones were pushing $2k.
    - CobaltFire 3y ago
      I was going to say I paid around half of what they list for, but it looks like they are closing out last years color right now. Inflation adjusted I paid about what they are asking today ($1,300). Pretty pricey, but I also got a bike fit and some other stuff and wanted a frame to just be done with it and ride. It’s served me well, and has many years of life left! Random side note: I just realized this is the second time in two days I’ve responded to you (other was regarding a 7 seat vehicle). HN can be quite a small place!
rhaway84773 3y ago
I wonder if there is space for a pure IP company which simply created bike specs that manufacturers can create bikes compatible with, and then advertise themselves as “BikeDesignA” compatible. Something like an ARM of the bike world.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  With three major manufacturers that would never play with such a new entrant I think that ship has sailed. That's why you typically see major brand bikes that are entirely built up using Shimano, SRAM or Campagnolo parts. Note that Shimano (80% of the market or so, 10K+employees) is 100 years old and that Campagnolo (90 or so, sub 1K employees) is a high end niche player. SRAM is with 35 years of history and 3K+ employees the 'new kid on the block'. So while I'm sympathetic to your idea in principle I think that in practice it would be really hard to get Shimano to play along with this, they have historically been real jerks about IP and have themselves been the subject of lawsuits involving unfair competition. I still use their products because I think they are value-for-money the best on the market but their corporate tactics suck.
  - wiredfool 3y ago
    But SRAM was Sachs, which had a bit of a history before that. (including developing the Ergo shifters in the 8sp era, which wound up at Campy)
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Hm, maybe I'm misremembering this but I thought SRAM was an American company that acquired Sachs at some point. And yes, Sachs has enormous history but they did not as far as I know morph into SRAM, they basically ran until the end of the line and sold to the highest bidder. I remember their 'Sachs Ultra WC', the Rolls Royce of mopeds from the 80's. Very nice stuff.
scott_w 3y ago
Reduced compatibility is an issue but some of these are not, depending on the manufacturer. SRAM 12s cassettes are incompatible with the 11s freehub but Shimano 12s is still compatible. You will need new shifters, so you’d just buy the whole upgrade together. Rim to disc is obviously incompatible but Shimano’s levers, rotors and callipers have all been forwards compatible so far on road bikes. Even upgrading your cassette to an incompatible standard is usually just a case of buying a new freehub body for your rear wheel (Shimano -> SRAM XDR). Ideal? No. Affordable? Yes. The biggest complaints usually come from bottom brackets and even here, changing is usually possible and affordable. Looking at Shimano, I’ve just upgraded my 2016 road bike from an older generation 105 crankset to a newer 4-arm crankset and didn’t need to change the bottom bracket. Things like forks, seatposts, handlebars can be an issue because they’re becoming more proprietary on higher end bikes. I’m not convinced this is an issue that affects your average commuter, however. I just bought a bike where this isn’t an issue, for example.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  A family member who is an 'above average' commuter has rebuilt bikes more than once until the frames wear out. He does commutes from Haarlem to Amsterdam every day and that really adds up in kilometers. It's never been a problem to get parts. Also: there is always the local equivalent of ebay if you want to keep bikes running, plenty of new old stock and parts with very little wear on them for sale. For a while I had a pretty rare team bike, a Guerciotti and even for that bike of which I'm pretty sure no more than a handful were ever made parts were readily available. Bikes are - fortunately - a commodity. What van Moof tried to do is the playbook of every crappy startup: to graft on future revenue onto an initial sale. Every trick they could employ to bind the customer to them they pulled and that's exactly what did them in. The bike industry from a bike manufacturers point of view looks completely different than from a bike parts manufacturers point of view. The amount of knowledge required to build a bike is a small fraction of the amount of knowledge required to build all the parts. So most manufacturers will select parts to achieve a certain price point and quality level, add their own frames (or even outsource the building of the frames) and slap their label on it. And even then they sometimes get it horribly wrong, for instance the 'Stella' brand (a mailorder brand in NL) seems to be incapable of designing a decent bike in spite of using quality parts. Bad chainlines, cracked frames, weird rake angles, I don't think there is a beginners mistake they haven't made yet. Van Moof could have been just as successful as Brompton, who make a relatively niche bike that is expensive but has an excellent reputation. Instead they wanted to be Apple, but without the incremental progress that got Apple to where they are today. It's an example of premature scaling: some strategies only make sense if you have achieved a certain scale. You can't leapfrog that process by deploying those strategies early, it will just bite you.
Tade0 3y ago
> For example, if the shifter of a modern bike breaks after some years of use, a replacement part will probably no longer be available. I had this happen to me - the people in the store said that they don't carry six-speed shifters anymore. Meanwhile my bike mechanic said, with visible irritation, "Just use a seven speed and lock the last gear."
wiredfool 3y ago
That article is overly dramatic and misses the point, or at least, is really pushing the "everything was better when things were older" point. It's also been discussed here extensively: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35534418 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34981363 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968743
prmoustache 3y ago
Also this mostly apply only to high end bikes. On the lower end you still get square taper bottom bracket, threaded 7 speed cassettes, etc. Also for the most parts, availability of replacement stuff is still high for years because the big transmission manufacturer know they get as much money selling replacement parts than new bikes and groupsets. They have no incentive to abandon old parts/standards completely.
Zigurd 3y ago
Bike design is full of cascading effects: Now we can make wheels out of carbon fiber. But they delaminate on big descents, because the brake track gets too hot. And this is worse on clincher rims which are displacing tubulars on high end bikes. So now road bikes need disc brakes. But the cheap mechanical disc brakes are worse than rim brakes on alloy rims. The effects of these changes are different at different price points. The game is to sell "sporty" bikes to a mass market of riders who want a racy feel but who seldom if ever race. Every year both technologies and prices change and product formulation is driven by these changes.

norir 3y ago

Yes. The other day I saw a modern looking bike with a chris king headset and I smiled. I wonder if there is an opportunity for a rogue group of manufacturers to essentially open source road bike designs and more or less freeze certain standards in the design (e.g. use threaded bottom brackets which are dramatically easier to maintain and give up little in _meaningful_ performance for most riders). Of course this would imply selling fewer bicycles to each individual consumer (though there would always be a need for replacement parts) so I'm sure the bike industry would hate such an idea.

jacquesm 3y ago
Bikes have been 'open sourced' since the early 1900's. It is only now with the advent of e-bikes and ridiculously overpriced racing bikes that the 'closed source' model has entered the equation. Bikes as a service is a thing now. You don't even own your bike anymore... I bought a -cheap- beater for a family member a few weeks ago for the grand sum of $80. It is an excellent bike by a prime brand manufacturer, it needed a little bit of work (roller brake service, one new spoke, some grease and a new rear light) and it's as good as new. I fully expect it to outlive me, and probably everybody else in this house if it is taken care of as well. I regularly see bikes from the 60's around here that are still in very good shape. The bike industry lives by: theft, bike accidents, kids growing up (kids are really rough on bikes) and cracks in frames. Everything else is fixable if the bike is of a reputable brand. Crap bikes not so much those have the weirdest parts.
switchbak 3y ago
Chris King headsets are still a thing. The headset madness of the 2000's has mostly settled down, and 3rd party headsets are a pretty trivial and standards compliant upgrade. We're even mostly settled into a standard bearing size (!). Bottom brackets are an example where we're coming back to sanity. The pressfit junk they pushed on us was for ease of manufacturing and low cost. Consumers realized they were worse, and they started to avoid those. The manufacturers have caught on and started putting threaded BBs back in, as they ought to. We've mostly got a set of semi-reasonable standards. In the MTB world at least, 148 rear hub width is almost ubiquitous, and 15mm front axles with boost spacing are effectively it outside of downhill applications. 6 bolt rotors of various sizes are essentially standard. The majority of the pain is where the big manufacturers (SRAM and Shimano) are battling it out: hub and chain/shifting standards. That is admittedly painful right now, but you can chalk most that up to corporate greed. All in all, I don't get the concern here. With a little bit of consideration of compatibility in a couple areas you can mix and match brands pretty easily on most of the bike.
- CobaltFire 3y ago
  I’ve been riding a PF30 BB since 2016 in all weather over thousands of miles and haven’t had a single creak. I will admit I do prefer a threaded BB, but I also think it’s an overstated issue. Then again, my frame is steel and I run a pretty high end Wheels Mfg BB. Maybe I’m insulated by that.

aidenn0 3y ago

Oh this is such a thing. The lack of compatibility also makes things less customizable. I used to always add a horizontal brake lever for reaching when I lift up from the drops (which I do when in traffic), but now that every shifter is different and every shifter is integrated into the brake levers it's not really an option. Somewhat unrelated I also kind of hate how popular aluminum has become (or at least was when I last bought a road bike). Since all the mass produced frames are aluminum, the only options for a steel frame were more exotic models and thus expensive. In retrospect I wish I had just bought a steel hybrid frame and built a bike myself, but I was rather busy at the time, and it probably still would have been more expensive since so many of the parts are non-interchangeable.

CobaltFire 3y ago
I ride a Niner RLT Steel (bought as a frame) for that exact reason. It was a tossup between that or a Lynsey, and I snagged a close out color of the Niner for 1/3 of the quoted price of the Lynsky at the time, and that included a carbon fork. I’m actually overhauling it now with an entire group set after riding the last one since 2016. Interesting fact that relates: the first couple years of the RLT Steel shipped with a fork that is 15x100 thru axle; nowadays the gravel/cyclocross market has settled on 12x100. So I ended up getting a set of New Old Stock (NOS) 29” wheels from that same era that are 15x100/12x142 and 22.5mm wide. Perfect for my bike, but vanishingly hard to find now as a set due to the oddball matchup.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Yeah, that frame costs more than my entire bike did. There were steel-framed options at the time, but the cheapest ones were pushing $2k.
  - CobaltFire 3y ago
    I was going to say I paid around half of what they list for, but it looks like they are closing out last years color right now. Inflation adjusted I paid about what they are asking today ($1,300). Pretty pricey, but I also got a bike fit and some other stuff and wanted a frame to just be done with it and ride. It’s served me well, and has many years of life left! Random side note: I just realized this is the second time in two days I’ve responded to you (other was regarding a 7 seat vehicle). HN can be quite a small place!

rhaway84773 3y ago

I wonder if there is space for a pure IP company which simply created bike specs that manufacturers can create bikes compatible with, and then advertise themselves as “BikeDesignA” compatible. Something like an ARM of the bike world.

jacquesm 3y ago
With three major manufacturers that would never play with such a new entrant I think that ship has sailed. That's why you typically see major brand bikes that are entirely built up using Shimano, SRAM or Campagnolo parts. Note that Shimano (80% of the market or so, 10K+employees) is 100 years old and that Campagnolo (90 or so, sub 1K employees) is a high end niche player. SRAM is with 35 years of history and 3K+ employees the 'new kid on the block'. So while I'm sympathetic to your idea in principle I think that in practice it would be really hard to get Shimano to play along with this, they have historically been real jerks about IP and have themselves been the subject of lawsuits involving unfair competition. I still use their products because I think they are value-for-money the best on the market but their corporate tactics suck.
- wiredfool 3y ago
  But SRAM was Sachs, which had a bit of a history before that. (including developing the Ergo shifters in the 8sp era, which wound up at Campy)
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Hm, maybe I'm misremembering this but I thought SRAM was an American company that acquired Sachs at some point. And yes, Sachs has enormous history but they did not as far as I know morph into SRAM, they basically ran until the end of the line and sold to the highest bidder. I remember their 'Sachs Ultra WC', the Rolls Royce of mopeds from the 80's. Very nice stuff.

scott_w 3y ago

Reduced compatibility is an issue but some of these are not, depending on the manufacturer. SRAM 12s cassettes are incompatible with the 11s freehub but Shimano 12s is still compatible. You will need new shifters, so you’d just buy the whole upgrade together. Rim to disc is obviously incompatible but Shimano’s levers, rotors and callipers have all been forwards compatible so far on road bikes. Even upgrading your cassette to an incompatible standard is usually just a case of buying a new freehub body for your rear wheel (Shimano -> SRAM XDR). Ideal? No. Affordable? Yes. The biggest complaints usually come from bottom brackets and even here, changing is usually possible and affordable. Looking at Shimano, I’ve just upgraded my 2016 road bike from an older generation 105 crankset to a newer 4-arm crankset and didn’t need to change the bottom bracket. Things like forks, seatposts, handlebars can be an issue because they’re becoming more proprietary on higher end bikes. I’m not convinced this is an issue that affects your average commuter, however. I just bought a bike where this isn’t an issue, for example.

jacquesm 3y ago
A family member who is an 'above average' commuter has rebuilt bikes more than once until the frames wear out. He does commutes from Haarlem to Amsterdam every day and that really adds up in kilometers. It's never been a problem to get parts. Also: there is always the local equivalent of ebay if you want to keep bikes running, plenty of new old stock and parts with very little wear on them for sale. For a while I had a pretty rare team bike, a Guerciotti and even for that bike of which I'm pretty sure no more than a handful were ever made parts were readily available. Bikes are - fortunately - a commodity. What van Moof tried to do is the playbook of every crappy startup: to graft on future revenue onto an initial sale. Every trick they could employ to bind the customer to them they pulled and that's exactly what did them in. The bike industry from a bike manufacturers point of view looks completely different than from a bike parts manufacturers point of view. The amount of knowledge required to build a bike is a small fraction of the amount of knowledge required to build all the parts. So most manufacturers will select parts to achieve a certain price point and quality level, add their own frames (or even outsource the building of the frames) and slap their label on it. And even then they sometimes get it horribly wrong, for instance the 'Stella' brand (a mailorder brand in NL) seems to be incapable of designing a decent bike in spite of using quality parts. Bad chainlines, cracked frames, weird rake angles, I don't think there is a beginners mistake they haven't made yet. Van Moof could have been just as successful as Brompton, who make a relatively niche bike that is expensive but has an excellent reputation. Instead they wanted to be Apple, but without the incremental progress that got Apple to where they are today. It's an example of premature scaling: some strategies only make sense if you have achieved a certain scale. You can't leapfrog that process by deploying those strategies early, it will just bite you.

Tade0 3y ago

> For example, if the shifter of a modern bike breaks after some years of use, a replacement part will probably no longer be available. I had this happen to me - the people in the store said that they don't carry six-speed shifters anymore. Meanwhile my bike mechanic said, with visible irritation, "Just use a seven speed and lock the last gear."

wiredfool 3y ago

That article is overly dramatic and misses the point, or at least, is really pushing the "everything was better when things were older" point. It's also been discussed here extensively: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35534418 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34981363 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968743

prmoustache 3y ago

Also this mostly apply only to high end bikes. On the lower end you still get square taper bottom bracket, threaded 7 speed cassettes, etc. Also for the most parts, availability of replacement stuff is still high for years because the big transmission manufacturer know they get as much money selling replacement parts than new bikes and groupsets. They have no incentive to abandon old parts/standards completely.

Zigurd 3y ago

Bike design is full of cascading effects: Now we can make wheels out of carbon fiber. But they delaminate on big descents, because the brake track gets too hot. And this is worse on clincher rims which are displacing tubulars on high end bikes. So now road bikes need disc brakes. But the cheap mechanical disc brakes are worse than rim brakes on alloy rims. The effects of these changes are different at different price points. The game is to sell "sporty" bikes to a mass market of riders who want a racy feel but who seldom if ever race. Every year both technologies and prices change and product formulation is driven by these changes.