“They just want you to buy the new stuff.” We’ve seen the comments in social media, heard those words on rides and back when they were still a thing, read them in letters to the editor in magazines. I heard a variation on this line a couple of weeks ago in reference to Ibis’s fifth generation Ripley when I mentioned to someone the frame’s evolution. The speaker didn’t know that I’d ridden exactly that bike earlier in the day.
I’ve always been troubled by this cynicism, largely because I’ve had the opportunity to speak with and interview scores of engineers and product managers over the years. I can say that I’ve never met anyone responsible for the creation of new bikes, components or other products who didn’t believe in their mission. They were, to a person, excited to have the opportunity to make the cycling experience better.
Have I met people who didn’t operate with the same earnest sense of mission, the same level of honesty? While I’ve met people working in marketing who overstated just how much better a given product was, as compared to its predecessor, my read on the situation can be summed up as exuberance. I do believe they were operating in good faith.
It was this exuberant marketing, and the disconnect between the romance of the claims and the actual incremental value of the product improvements that soured many consumers. I recall reading marketing copy that touted improved comfort at the saddle as a result of changes in the rear triangle, usually in the seatstays, on road bikes. The problem was that in almost every instance (the notable exception being Serotta’s DKS rear suspension) the tubing changes didn’t result in a great enough difference to register as an improvement. That is, they didn’t meet the rider’s threshold of perception.
That concept—threshold of perception—is what I think has made the improvements in bikes today worthwhile, not a joke. I’m working on a review of the Ibis Ripley V5 and when I compare it to the V4 and the AF, there is no doubt in my mind that this is a better mountain bike. The changes relative to its forebears can be subtle, but as someone who has dozens and dozens of hours on its predecessors, I can attest that the changes have resulted in a bike that has allowed me to ride like I just increased my skill. We’ve entered an era where the engineering that goes into bikes results in real changes.
Diminishing returns
There’s one realm of bike design where there is still room to make real changes, but I’m eyeing them with increasing suspicion: Drivetrains.
While advances in bicycle frame engineering have resulted in real, appreciable gains in the consumer’s experience, the continued evolution of drivetrains may be headed in the opposite direction. This is one occasion where working in good faith may not bring about an improvement in the rider’s experience.
The ever-increasing number of gears is headed toward a point of performance inversion. As the number of cogs continues to increase and cogs continue to narrow and the space between cogs shrinks, shifting is going to grow ever more finicky and chains ever weaker and cassette and chainring life ever shorter. This is an implicit argument for the why of electronic drivetrains. When derailleurs need to move with accuracy measured in fractions of a millimeter, mechanical derailleurs operated by a cable pulled by a mechanism more than a meter away simply aren’t going to cut it.
For that reason, drivetrains will ever rise in cost, but then so does gas.
Here’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me: The gear range did not increase substantially from 10-speed to 12 speed. Shimano offers an 11-34, 10-speed cassette, and SRAM now offers an 11-36, 12-speed cassette. Sure, there’s a wide-range cassette available from microSHIFT and you can pair an 11-speed 11-51, 11-speed cassette with the GRX 12-speed, long-cage derailleur to achieve a wide-range 1x gravel setup, but I’m not talking workarounds.
The jump from five speeds to six was huge, as was the jump from six speeds to seven. Those jumps represent a 20 percent and a 16.7 percent increase in options, respectively. But the increase from 12 speeds to 13 is half of the gain from six to seven: just 8.3 percent.
It seems reasonable to ask that if component companies are going to add a cog, they ought to add range. Gone are the days of Shimano’s jump from seven to eight speeds and the marketing copy that answered the question of where the new cog was: ‘Right in the middle, where you need it most.’ That quote might not be exact, but I remember the Dura-Ace ads saying essentially that.
But who are the buyers?
Do I think the folks at the big component makers operate in good faith? I do. But I also think they need to get out more. They need to visit more group rides populated by people who have never raced. We’ve had subcompact cranks (e.g., 46/30) for more than 10 years, but I almost never see them spec’d on road or gravel bikes. I would bet my kids’ college funds that we’d see a great many more people use that 11t small cog on their cassette if their chainrings were smaller. And for that matter, why don’t we have cassettes that begin with 12- or 13-tooth cogs?
That brings me to my bigger point: What riders need more than another cog is a gear range that better corresponds to the speeds at which they ride. So, yeah, I think bike and component makers mean well, but whereas it was once difficult to produce a frame of notable improvement over its predecessors, that is no longer the case. On the other hand, despite all the advances in component technology, most road drivetrains don’t serve the average rider any better than they did 20 years ago. Mountain bike drivetrains have never seemed more intelligent. Why is that not the case with the road?
My suggestion? We don’t need more gears nearly as much as we need gears appropriate to the speeds most of us go.