this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Bicycles

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Another win for older tech?

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (53 children)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I have never understood the appeal of electronic shifting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (28 children)

Same, but then again, I still don't understand the appeal of automatic transmissions in cars (despite that being all I own these days). I generally prefer simpler machines with less stuff that can break.

Bicycles should be extremely simple. You pedal to go, and if you want to go faster for the same RPM, you push the chain up a gear. If you have gears in the front and back, you shift the front every few times you shift the back. That's it, that's all the complexity I need in a bicycle.

What happens if you're out on a ride and your battery dies? You just can't shift anymore? That's terrible! Or what if a thief steals your fancy electronic shifter? What if the SW goes bad and the pairing breaks? There's just so much that can go wrong, and not a lot of backup options. If my derailleur gets messed up on a ride, I can probably still use a handful of gears, enough to get home. If a shifter breaks and I have tools, I can adjust the indexer to keep it in a decent gear to get home. It's like that manual transmission, if something breaks, I can probably work around it.

[–] PlusMinus 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I just rode nine weeks across the Alps with my SRAM X0 Transmission and the battery lasted the whole trip. A spare doesn't way too much though. A rock hit my transmission hard and it needed slight adjustment. I took less than a second and I did not have to get of my bike. Also, installing the transmission was super easy. All in all, I think it is way more convenient than mechanical shifting, if you are willing to pay the price. It's probably not worth it for most people.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I'm not worried about one trip soon after purchase, I'm worried about one trip about 5-10 years after purchase. By then, I'll probably have misplaced the spare or the spare has died, and I'd be SOL.

I rarely ride for pleasure, it's almost exclusively for transportation, so I'm not going to be doing a ton of prep for each ride. I want things to fail gracefully so I can reliably get home. Having shifting completely fail is a pretty big deal.

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