Evolving Bike Standards

Q: Of those new products, standards, or innovations, do any stand out as being particularly unnecessary or bad?

Noah: Of all the new stuff that’s been introduced in the last couple years, the one that really bugs me are all the new and different wheel sizes.

Unlike the 1x stuff I talked about above, the new wheel sizes aren’t backwards compatible. You can’t put a 27.5+ wheel into your existing frame; if you’ve gobbled up the marketing hype and decided you really need 27.5+, you basically have to buy a whole new bike. It feels like manufacturers are purposely making things incompatible just so we have to throw more money at them.

And for the record, all the new hub widths are dumb as well, but that’s a rant for another day. (Editor’s note: Or not…)

Marshal: Any standard that does not rely on science to support marketing claims causes me to be skeptical. Boost hubs are a great example. This “standard” was introduced this spring. It adds 10mm to the front axle width, totalling 110mm wide (while keeping the 15mm diameter), and adds 6mm to the rear axle width to wind up at 148mm wide. This standard was released in conjunction with “plus” sized bikes—where a tire is 2.8-3.0” wide, in part to add more tire clearance by bumping the driveline outboard 5mm.

While discussing the “advantages” of this standard, all of the marketing material keeps talking about “bracing angles”. I would like to see some testing that actually supports improved performance in the lab and on the dirt, as opposed to the theoretic justifications currently being promoted.

One does not feel a difference in wheel stiffness when riding a 157mm wide hub, compared to the same rim and spokes laced to a 142mm hub. The new 148mm standard is right in between the 142mm and 157mm standards, and my understanding is that this is the widest hub one can build, while keeping chain line in check with a 73mm wide bottom bracket shell.

One does, however, feel a difference when riding a zero dish singlespeed or mini cluster (i.e. 7spd) rear wheel where there is even spoke tension and length. That, sadly, is not what we are seeing with the new Boost standard. But the good news is that it leaves the door open for another standard in a year or two!

I don’t think these standards are “unnecessary” or “bad” per se, but they certainly are short sighted and have a negative impact on the health of the marketplace in the near term, specifically by reducing consumer confidence in purchasing something expensive.

Tasha: Some small innovations are definitely unnecessary. I just had to redo my internally routed shifter cable and make them external due to problems with the interface between the housing and cable entry into the frame.

This “innovation” of internally routed cables is fairly useless, and completely producer-driven to make bikes look sleek and add another bullet point in the list of a bike’s features. I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t try to make good looking bikes (I ride a murdered-out trail bike, and for the most part, refuse to put anything on it that isn’t black), but some small innovations are excessive, and actually less user-friendly.

Xan: I think it could be argued that every recent innovation has been unnecessary. I say this not because I believe we should all still be riding rigid steel bikes around, but because most recent developments weren’t something that consumers truly needed or were asking for.

Most riders weren’t even asking for a new wheel size five years ago. But when 29ers came into the mainstream, people liked them and accepted them.

Now there are plenty of people out there that won’t ride anything else. So in my book, the 29er was a good innovation that brought a lot of products to the market that riders loved, but I still wouldn’t call it a “necessary” one.

And today, we seem to be confronted with innovations that could be bad BECAUSE they are unnecessary. We’re sacrificing a lot of compatibility for claimed advantages that might not be very valid, while simultaneously making everything more expensive because of smaller production batches.

I’m personally going to hold off on forming too much of an opinion about the advantages of plus-sized wheels until I ride one later this year, but there’s no denying that this new standard could create inconvenience and drain our wallets more than it enhances our trail experiences.

Tom: I’m pretty skeptical of hub width changes. Done properly, bike companies could have agreed on a standard that worked for all bikes. Most annoying are the 15×100 front hubs. They replaced 20×110 hubs, and are now being replaced by 15×110 hubs. It seems like the 15×100 could easily have been skipped over if designers had a little foresight.

Marshal: Especially given that “plus sized” wheels and tires fit just fine into many existing 100mm-wide axle forks and current frame geometries and hub designs…

Q: In the bike industry, does demand drive innovation, or follow it?

Noah: A bit of both. In the best cases, a need exists, and innovation meets that need. Narrow/wide chainrings are a good example of that.

But these days, too often it seems that someone makes something, and then the marketing team is tasked with convincing the buying public that they need it.

Two years ago: Fat bikes are the greatest thing ever, and everyone needs one!

Now: Fat bikes aren’t good enough!  You need a 27.5+ (or 29+, if you listen to Trek).

And before that it was 27.5, and before that it was 29.

It seems like manufacturers have realized that they can either (1) make the best product, (2) make an ok product at a great price, or (3) make something different and incompatible and then get the marketing department to convince everyone to buy it.

(1) and (2) are fine—that’s been going on forever in every industry.

But (3) is the equivalent of Ford suddenly deciding to mass produce this…

…and embarking on a massive ad campaign saying how it’s the next best thing and anyone that doesn’t own one doesn’t know what they’re missing.

Marshal: Like Boost, I think Pressfit bottom brackets and drop-in headsets are a great example. This “innovation” was driven by reducing (or at least maintaining) costs of the bike to the end user, and shaving off as much weight as possible. There is great pressure from the consumer to get more and more technology at lower prices and lighter weights (compare a $3500 full suspension bike now to what you got for that price 10 years ago).

Therefore, these “innovations” are driven by consumer demand in a roundabout way, even though the previous standards were completely acceptable, and run with much fewer issues than the newer designs (e.g., all the creaking and noise that comes from PF30 bottom brackets and ZS headsets).

Xan: In some cases, innovation occurs as a way to meet a demand created by a new type of riding. Take the freeride movement of the late 90s and early 2000s. Canadians started getting creative with they way they rode bikes, and suddenly there was a demand for steeper-angled, single-crown bikes that could handle low-speed maneuvers on suspended skinnies, all while retaining a lot of the stiffness of DH bikes of the time.

If we look outside the bike industry for a second, we see countless examples of demand following innovation. It sometimes seems that the attitude of the consumer electronics industry is, “Let’s invent something new and then figure out how we can sell it.” Time and money goes into innovation, but just as much effort goes into making sure the innovation is pushed to be made desirable by consumers.

In the bike industry, I’ve recently been seeing far more cases of demand following innovation. Then again, some of our favorite products are things that we never needed or asked for, but we bought them and even fell in love with them (see what I said above about 29ers).

The sad thing here is when riders end up feeling like they have to drop thousands of dollars each year to keep up with new standards before the resale value of their gear plummets, and when our entire sport gets divided into even more micro-niches that drive the price of each individual product up.

Marshal: I don’t know, Xan, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the first step for innovating in the tech world is to identify a need that is currently unfulfilled, then create a product to address that need. That means consumers drive innovation. I would argue tech fields are the purest form of that (cf: Apple). Marketing is required in these fields to convince consumers one product is more relevant than another, or how to apply the new technology into their daily life (e.g., iPod, iPad, etc). This is the opposite of the bike industry, where bikes have a lot of similarities at a given price point, and the differences are more in the minutiae (e.g., worrying about .1” of bb height or .5 deg head angle).

Tom: It seems to me that standards are being changed for manufacturing ease more frequently now. In the long run, I think this will result in better, less expensive bikes. But in the short term, we are in a painful period where new issues are being introduced without much or any benefit to the end user.

NEXT: Balance, Obsolescence, Etc.