Thank God for Rivendell

[Patrick Moore]

I’m serious when I say that I largely keep up with the latest bike technology through the BSNYC blog  as much as by Bike Radar/Rumor/whathave you.

Recently BS related how he feared that the latest “technology” had reached the outermost limits of absurdity and that he’d no longer have anything to make fun of; in today’s post he comes across something that manages to do that.

https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/zipp-reveals-first-ever-smart-wheels-with-integrated-live-tyre-pressure-sensors-but-its-also-snuck-out-an-even-more-interesting-product/

Apparently this apparatus builds an electric tire pressure sensing system in the rim itself, comes with a proprietary tire courtesy of Goodyear, and has a GUI integrated with a suite of other digital measuring systems all compatible with your iPhone.

How is this bicycling? I want to be open minded. Is there any real-world utility for this sort of complication?

Patrick Moore — who prefers one ring, one cog,* one brake in ABQ, NM.

*Dingle; counts as one cog because 2 are fused into one. 

--

Patrick Moore

Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum

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When thou didst not, savage, know thine own meaning,

But wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish,

I endowed thy purposes with words that made them known.

[Benz Ouyang, Sunnyvale, CA]

If you can't detect that your tire pressures are too low, you probably need to ride more.

:)

I can see how these systems can be useful for exalted pros (margin gains, yada yada yada…), but for the "commoner cyclist", it's one more complication that will distract from enjoying our just riding along. I'm already trying to avoid electronic shifting, and most of my bikes have cyclocomputers whose battery life is measured in coin cells and years (instead of having to recharge every 25-35 hours of use). And I prefer to have a preflight checklist consisting of only 4 steps: 1. tire pressure check, 2. spare tube/tool/pump check, 3. wallet/keys/cell phone check, and 4. water bottle check. I will admit to riding on machines with more than 1 cog, 1 ring and 1 brake though.

[Garth]

I'd seen and heard of this at this years Paris Roubaix classic race. Kind of a yawner really as is anything related to computer/tech and bicycles. Nothing surprises me in this a the world of pro cycling is driven by sponsors/manufacturers as without them, there is no team to speak of. It's not like any other sport where there is a team owned by someone that participates in a league of some kind, gets revenue from adverts and such, nope, these teams are entirely dependent on the sponsors for everything. Sponsors are looking to sell the latest gadget, and pro cyclists are the perfect dupes to to model the products to the public.

Sure, while I'm not into tech with any form of transport, there are many who are and that's who's buying this stuff.  Visit any cycling forum you'll see lots of people with money to eagerly buy the latest and greatest product, whatever it may be. Hasn't that always been the case ? In "their" shoes, I'd do the same, so there's that, no room for condemnation.

 I had a lovely cold bike ride today on my lovely mechanical bicycle wearing my high fallutin' road clothing that kept me warm and comfy, and I can't ask for more than that.

[Shannon Menkveld]

While it doesn't interest me, and even if it did the proprietary tires would be a deal breaker, the idea isn't fundamentally terrible.

The two obvious use cases I can think of would be: 

1) On urban utility / commute / cargo bikes, where you're running some gawdawful SuperUltraMarathon Tyre of the Apocalypse, and you couldn't feel the difference until there's like 13 pounds of air in the tire and you get a pinch flat on a big street crack. At dusk. In February. And it's raining.

2) Bike share bikes and similar... have the bikes "phone home" when their tires get low, so a tech can be dispatched without relying on the user to report a problem. Even just locking the docking station so that nobody can rent the bike would be a big help, and requires a lot less new IT infrastructure than a roaming system would.

--Shannon

[ascpgh]

Car companies have had to shift their paradigms to account for the coming of people who wanted a phone when they turned 16, not a vehicle. The products marketed to them are filled with features not interesting to those who like cars and driving them. 

The same seems to be happening in the bicycle business, the next greatest things and the makers' adoption of them is great fodder if you like bikes and riding them. All of these "innovations" and the bikes that have them are becoming a recurrent conversation topic in some ride groups. 

Thankfully some reality (and BSNY) skewers this fog. I've had a number of IG posts come to my feed with videos of disc brake operator error induced road bike crashes, some labelled specifically in taunt of riders' inability to modulate them. 

My bandwidth of all of these advancements chews away from my interests and enjoyment, even the rainy commuting over the last three days where the single highest regard I had was a tie between my VO Zeppelin fenders or my SON hub and LED lighting (its disc brakes remain consistently outside the top five).

Andy Cheatham

Pittsburgh