The REAL Reason They Keep Adding More Gears to Bikes

so to absolutely no one surprised recently both stram and Shimano announced their impending 13-speed group sets probably the most predictable upgrades ever spoiler alert but I bet they're already working on 14-speed and 15-speed drivetrains with wireless braking AI shifting machine learning capabilities able to Shi for you and it will also come with a downloadable so you can put it on your zift bike really hate this future that we're moving towards and no doubt even with the increased number of Gears the range will probably be the same perpetually cutting the same size pizza into ever and ever smaller triangles the question I ask myself whenever I see these really unremarkable unsurprising upgrades is who asked for these and why and more and more as much of a charitable read I want to give it to me the answers are no one and money cuz let's get real every few years a new group set gets trotted out and all the big bike media Outlets gush about how precise and perfect the shifting is rendering the previous iterations you know worthless and how this finally is the greatest thing since sliced bread it's a new group set of the people yada yada yada ad nauseum and maybe they'll throw in you know so and so won this race with it so therefore you should buy it only to repeat the same song and dance for the next shiny object a few years down the road and am I the only one that's kind of getting tired of this increase you know gear fatigue and the thing is as much as I hate these Innovations you know I understand why they do it look I think we can all agree that the bicycle is a mature product uh all its major flaws and problems have been solved and like for a while two wheels of equal size pneumatic tires a triangulated frame brakes and some sort of Drive mechanism and that's it there's very little that can be meaningfully approved upon on the bike Essence is there and it's perfect it is a solved problem I think we're in that lifespan of the bicycle where what else is there to do but mess with perfection at this point uh you know most bike brands especially the component companies are just fiddling with the details it's like a painter who doesn't have the discipline to not mess with Masterpiece and just call the work done and the thing is they have to keep doing this they have to do it to keep the lights on to keep the money rolling in to keep growing the business I feel like at this point the goal isn't to make better bikes necessarily or to make them meaningfully better the goal is to obfuscate uh the fact that most people's bikes are already pretty good and you have to manufacture new problems to be solved I think the truth is that any decent bike that You' bought within the last 20 years could potentially be your bike for a lifetime think about that outside of tweaks to make it fit over time everything it needs to be a functional bike is already there i' I'd go as far to say as we could probably literally stop any new development in Bike Tech this very second and all the bikes we have would be perfectly ridable until the eventual heat death of our solar system and our level of joy in riding a bike would probably be the same I don't know what else you could add to make riding a bike more fun for me certainly another gear uh isn't it maybe more range I'd be I'd be stoked on that but the sad truth is that component companies have to keep improving things uh diddling with the Masterpiece to stay in business hence I'm going to borrow a brand new uh economics term we are in the inen ification stage of bicycles where the value to the end user that's you and me has largely been fulfilled and now it's about shifting value to a handful of component companies to keep them in business or their shareholders we're in that late stage we're up up grades and standards aren't created to solve real problems anymore but because they're essentially part of a publishing schedule to keep profits rolling in and to keep people buying new things and new bikes I swear I wasn't the cynical when I first started cycling but it's really hard to see it otherwise when every two years bikes get another gear but no increase in range things are getting increasingly computerized and put in Black boxes where you need apps to manipulate them essentially make making us more reliant on single companies to keep our bikes moving that is just bananas I think specifically if we're going to point fingers at who's causing most of the inci ification I think it's a component manufacturers frame Builders build bikes to match the existing components I mean think think of all the recent compatibility headaches you've experienced it always goes back to the component manufacturers and not the people making the actual frames you know broadly speaking here that's the reason why mountain and Road group sets stop talking to each other after 9 or 10 speed and are only now being reunited but you have to do it electronically or there was that dark and horrible span of time when it seemed as if like every 3 months there was a brand new pressfit bottom bracket standard and now chains are incompatible it used to be up until 11speed there was generally good compatibility between the component Brands and even between Road and Mountain groups that's no longer the case with 12-speed and likely 13p speed you know there are going to be Road chains that only work with Road bikes and mountain bike chains that only work with mountain bikes and they only work within their brands this is just the start of it it's probably going to get worse and look I can already hear the comments you know I'm no leite I might be becoming a boomer now uh but I use a computer clearly I edit videos I'm not anti- technology I use a lot of tech in my day-to-day but I only adopt that Tech when it makes a meaningful benefit to me I am however really skeptical of whizbang technology that promises the world and and in reality all you end up is with a JPEG of a monkey there was a time which I don't think was that long ago where the value of something was in its longevity and its durability I think we've been tricked into trading you know compatibility and durability and longevity for for ease of use for convenience and aerodynamics sadly however I don't have any solutions there's likely nothing we can do to stop this uh inchi ification process I think even if there was an engineer atam or mono that felt this way it's her job to keep on publishing components with new gears and Manufacturing solutions to problems that didn't really exist at least in my opinion we see this in all Industries and what actually made me think of making this video was a video I was watching in the camera YouTube space someone was positing that Sony was likely to create a new camera mount and not because there was anything wrong with their current Mount or their current cameras it's that their lens lineup was fully mature fully fleshed out and they can't survive on the sale of just new cameras they need to sell lenses so so to solve this the possible solution would be to create a new standard uh a new camera mount so that there are more lenses for people to buy I this should sound strangely familiar at the end of the day we can at least be aware of this problem and ask ourselves if this new upgrade is really fixing a problem or making things worse or just ever corralling us into a future of ever more disposable components and bikes and if you work in bike media you should be a little bit more critical and talk about these things I can try to point this out and show Alternatives but at the end of the day I'm kind of like a small Niche channel on the fringes of the bike industry uh I'm not sponsored and videos like this are probably why I came to bikes because they provided an analog Escape From The Daily Grind you know something simple that I could understand I could adapt to myself and I just see the moving further and further away from that so hence hence I make these videos if you like that idea then please join us on patreon or pick up a sticker uh like I mentioned we're not sponsored um uh part of it might be because we push back against these major industry Trends patreon is too much of a commitment consider picking up a sticker or a shirt all the links below and also let me know what you think of these opinion pieces should I do more they're always a bit of a a mixed bag for me because they can potentially do really well and it's authentically the things I think you know I don't want to alienate viewers but mostly I just don't want to deal with the comments because they you know the comments get like ridiculous anyways anyways if you agree disagree found this entertaining please consider supporting the Channel all the links below and as always keep this up sidea

Channel: Path Less Pedaled

Views: 43,387

Keywords: bicycle touring, bikepacking, bicycle, travel, tourism, ride, adventure cycling, pathlesspedaled, the path less pedaled, bike touring, bikepacking gear, bike gearing, roadslikethese, gravelspecific, partypace, gravel bike

Id: NCh31fDxtQw

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 16 2024