Another win for older tech?
Maybe I’m missing something, but I have never understood the appeal of electronic shifting.
It sounds awesome to me if it’s perfected and batteries can get smaller with longer charge.
No. More. Cables. Less stuff and the moving parts of the shifters, etc. Great idea to me, even if it’s still got issues. If I was rich I’d definitely try a build out with these.
Less stuff and the moving parts of the shifters, etc.
Would be more stuff and moving parts. Now you’ve got little electric motors/servos involved, batteries, etc. I’d be pretty surprised if it saves any weight.
Less moving parts at the switch, or none. Switch could be all electronic/digital/wireless. No more cables. Also without the cables requiring an external input mechanical connection near the derailleur, there’s better opportunity to “seal” the inside electromechanical components from the outside world.
I’ve never seen cables as a problem. They aren’t great looking, but most good manufacturers route them through the frame now anyways.
Are you asking about electronic, or wireless shifting? Because electronic wired shifting is also a thing, and adds some advantages, while wireless adds more advantages on top of that.
I’ve never used either, but from people who have, I’ve heard that the shifting is a lot smoother on electronic shifting than mechanical. Whether smoother shifting is actually worth the price seems to be the debate most people have.
As for wireless, the advantages there become a little clearer and easier to explain. You can put the shifters wherever you want for maximum convenience. In the drops if you spend a lot of time sprinting. At the ends of your aero bars if you’re a triathlete or time trialist. You can even have multiple shifters at multiple positions. Plus, yeah, the stuff @[email protected] says about removing cables.
As I said though, this is all by reputation. I’ve only ever used mechanical.
I meant both wired and wireless. I hear that the shifting is faster and smoother than cables, but my cable shifting feels perfectly acceptable as it is. I can’t imagine a slight improvement there is worth the hassle of dealing with batteries dying, servos wearing out or getting shorted by liquid ingress, or the security issues of wireless that the article mentions.
But then, maybe I’m just a Luddite.
I switched my bike to Di2. Best thing I’ve done. I was tired of shift cables breaking.
Everyone always says that cables work great and are trouble free, but my 105 11-speed was a cable eater. Apparently it’s a known issue with them, one guy I know replaces his cables every 6 months to avoid having them break during a ride. The last one that broke was installed by a pro and had less than 2k miles on it, and there was no warning there was any problem before the ride.
A few times I caught it and replaced the cable before it broke on a ride, but I’ve had breaks several times during rides. I never had an issue with my older 8 speed setup, so I think it’s something to do with the bend the cable has to make in the shifter.
And even when the cable wasn’t breaking, it felt like I needed to adjust the derailleur every so often to get it to shift juuuuust right.
Di2 has been set and forget, for the most part - I recharge the battery every few weeks. I haven’t had to do anything else to it since installation.
It’s so easy to operate, too. I know cables are also easy to operate, but electronic is even easier. Just tap the button or hold the button. The front derailleur auto aligns as needed, too. I spend a lot less time worrying about my drivetrain during and after rides.
You can also get information about your riding from it - how much time do you spend in each gear? I know I shift every 8 seconds, on average, which makes me think I might be shifting too often. (I also ride in hilly areas, so I definitely use all of my gears.)
Someone else noted the buttons I can use to control the computer. I have mine set to switch screens on the computer, and I use it pretty regularly. Nice not having to take my hands off the grips to do that.
I’m glad I made the switch, and I won’t go back. I also built my gravel bike with Di2, and I’m glad I did it there, too. If people want to use cables, that’s fine with me, but I’m really happy with the electronic setup.
And Di2 is becoming more accessible. No regrets here either. It’s s luxury but one that’s worth it.
I just spoke to someone I know whose bike has electronic gears. Batteries dying can be a real problem, but neither they nor anyone else I’ve heard of has ever had problems with liquid ingress or servos wearing out; I think those are largely fake scaremongering, at least on reputable brand bikes. In fact from what I’ve seen, water and dirt are more likely to cause problems for mechanical shifting than for electronic.
As for the shifting, the person I spoke to said yeah it definitely is noticeably better, but not so much better that they’d have bothered with it, if it weren’t for the fact that the bike they were getting only comes with electronic gears.
I read that electronic shifting can automatically downshift when you come to a stop which I find a little tempting. But not tempting enough at the price I’ve seen. There’s a spot on my regular route where my habit is to downshift 6 times as I come to a stop sign at the bottom of a hill. I do wonder what it would be like not to have to think about that so much.
I believe some electronic gears are also really good at changing gear under pressure, which can be fantastic in a situation like that even if you doesn’t automatically downshift for you.
What does “under pressure” mean? Does it mean shifting while stopped? I’m told some non-electronic belt drives can do that.
Just the opposite! It means while pedalling hard. Normally, to change gears, you need to ease off the pressure, similar to how you put down the clutch to change gears in a car. This can be awkward when trying to get moving from too hard a gear, or if you forgot to change gears before arriving at a hill.
but I have never understood the appeal of electronic shifting.
I spoke with a guy who has the Shimano Di2. One of the main benefits is that you don’t have to index the derailleur… it automatically does it and always puts you in gear without any BS.
He also mentioned something about automatic shifting, which sounds interesting.
When integrated with a bike computer, it can do some other cool tricks. The shifters can also control a bike computer, which can be convenient.
At the end of the day, all of my manual shifters (grip shift, brake lever, and trigger…) all work perfectly fine and can’t be hacked. LOL
When you make cycling too complex, it takes the fun out of it, IMO.
Less maintenance for sure. The biggest thing for me is I get to use all 24 gears without hearing the chain rub on the front mech.
I wouldn’t say it’s a big enough upgrade to replace a groupset on an existing bike. However when I do buy my next bike I’ll aim to get DI2.
I spoke with a guy who has the Shimano Di2. One of the main benefits is that you don’t have to index the derailleur… it automatically does it and always puts you in gear without any BS.
^^^ This.
Cables work fine when you’re dealing with nine or ten rear gears, but going up from that to eleven or more gears, indexing becomes a problem, and an electrically-operated derailleur that can hit a gear correctly, quickly, every single time is nice.
For casual riders this probably doesn’t matter, since people ride around on badly-tuned derailleurs all day long and just put up with it. Heck, even recreational racers probably don’t need it. This is for guys wearing yellow or polka-dot jerseys around France, for whom milliseconds lost to shifting make a real difference.
I’m nowhere near good enough for this to make a difference for me, and I wouldn’t want the complexity, which is why my commuter has no gears at all–I was tired of fiddling and wanted something that would never, ever break.
I feel a wired solution would be better, more reliable and more secure, but wireless is the new black.
I feel a wired solution would be better, more reliable and more secure, but wireless is the new black.
And to be honest, a friction shifter would probably still be more reliable than an indexed derailleur. It’s too bad this “old tech” gets pushed away for newer, more complex stuff :(
I think the issue with friction shifters was that you can miss or end up between gears, but with eleven speeds and almost no space between them, you have a good point.
Yes, friction shifting is often by feel. That’s a pro and a con, depending on who you ask 😂
I do, but it’s not for me. Especially not at that price.
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.
I still don’t understand the appeal of automatic transmissions in cars
Being able to drink a soda while accelerating to freeway speeds is nice. Not having to shift a thousand times to move 50 feet in stop and go traffic is also nice. Manual transmissions are fun when you’re driving for fun. For everything else I think automatic is way more convenient.
Eh, I didn’t have too much trouble with stop and go traffic, I just left it in first with my foot on the clutch. The worst part is parking on hills, I learned to drive a stick in the Seattle area, and I had to parallel park on a ton of hills. Inevitably, some jerk would park really close behind me and I’d nearly hyperventilate pulling out w/o rolling back into them.
But honestly, stop and go sucks regardless of the transmission, so I just try to avoid it. I go to work early and cut out a bit early to miss rush hour, which works most of the time unless there’s an accident or something. That’s not feasible for everyone, but I have that flexibility, so it’s nice, and I only need to go in 2x/week as well (I’m pretty spoiled).
I wish I could bike to work, but it would take nearly 2 hours each way due to the distance. Maybe I’ll throw on a Bafang and see if I can get that down to an hour :).
I relied on my handbrake a lot when I was driving a manual in hilly cities.
I did at first, but eventually got tired of it and learned to rev the engine just right to not slide backward. I definitely use it for parking though.
Oh man, learning to drive in Seattle sounds really scary, especially a stick. You can’t even see what’s in front of you at the top of some of those hills. You probably developed masterful clutch control from those parking experiences though.
Edit: for the biking to work thing, can you take the bus or light rail part of the way? That’s what I used to do, when I was still going into the office. I’d take the bus to a stop that was a couple miles from work, and then bike the rest of the way. The only sucky part about it was if there were already too many cyclists on the bus, since that meant there was nowhere to stow my bike and I couldn’t get on. Then I’d have to wait for the next bus or just ride the work. One time I chased the bus until one of the cyclists got off, then I sprinted on my bike as hard as I could to get to the next stop before the bus. That was pretty fun.
Yup, waiting at a stoplight on a hill in the pouring rain was not fun… Never had an accident though.
That’s amazing. You must have had a wonderful instructor. I learned to drive in L.A., which was also a harrowing experience. I’ll say this, most Seattle area drivers drive me crazy having come from Southern California. They’re so fucking slow, and there’s always some slow poke in the passing lane keeping pace with the slow poke next to him, holding up traffic for thousands of people. The other day some dude in front of me was going 25 mph and merging into the freeway with a 55 mph speed limit. You sound like you’re probably an exception though, and a good driver. The stick shift thing alone sets you apart.
Yeah, my dad was pretty great (he’s been driving a Miata for as long as I remember). I also lived on a hill, and the second and third cars I had were manuals (first car died within a year of getting my license).
Honestly, Seattle drivers when I lived there were some of my favorite. Yeah, they drive closer to the speed limit, but they’re generally really nice. If I put my signal to merge, they make space. If I come up behind them in the passing lane, they move over. I’m now in Utah, and the opposite is true. If I signal, they close the gap to prevent me from merging. If I come up behind them, they slow down. If I move around to pass them, they speed up. If I honk because they’re sleeping at a light, there’s a non-zero chance they’ll get out of their car and confront me. I’ve gotten used to it by now though.
That said, I’m not a big fan of California drivers, but they do get one thing right: they keep the speed up in rush hour. They absolutely cannot handle a little rain on the road (I remember something like 5 accidents when there was a bit of rain when I visited), and I’m guessing icy roads are much worse (we blame a lot of winter accidents here on Cali transplants, not sure how true that is). Cali drivers are super impatient, and they’re liberal with their use of the horn. But at least they can keep the speed up in traffic, I’ll give them that.
I generally prefer simpler machines with less stuff that can break.
have had 3 different manual cars, the only one that didn’t have clutch issues was the rx-7, my vw golf and ford fiesta had terrible transmissions. like made out of duct tape and bubble gum bad.
since then, had hondas and they’re built like little brick shithouses - excellent life, fuel consumption etc. they make the 80s and 90s cars I owned look like yugos.
Nice. I guess I was lucky, because the two I had didn’t have any issues with the clutch (Honda Civic and Saturn SC2 coupe), and both gave me 200k+ miles. The Saturn had problems with an oil leak into the engine, but other than that, it was pretty trouble-free aside from a starter issue.
What ever happened to Saturn? They were everywhere in the 00’s. Did Hyundai and Kia put them out of business or something?
It was a GM brand that largely took sales from other GM brands, and in 2008 during the recession, GM cut a lot of its brands, and Saturn was one of them (as well as Pontiac and Saab). It basically absorbed Saturn into Chevrolet.
Ah okay. I had a Pontiac in my 20s. It was pretty similar to one of the Saturn models. It was actually a great car, which really surprised me.
But a clutch is cheap to replace. A whole automatic transmission costs a fortune to replace.
the ford was, the vw, I blame the mechanic, they fixed it three times, and got it fixed right once, eventually, after weeks. like, fuck man, it’s a vw golf, I could probably knock rocks together and forge a replacement clutch in three weeks…
and in all the automatics I’ve owned, I’ve never had to replace a transmission. now, like I said, they’ve all been hondas, I hear that has something to do with it, but yeah… my experience was more issues with clutches in manuals than any transmission issues in automatics. My uncle says that domestically mfg’rd clutches from the 80s sucked compared to the 60s and 70s, but I have no practical experience there.
I do miss being able to pop the clutch to start it :D
Oh man, my 1971 VW Super Beetle had a horrible clutch. I was always having to get that thing adjusted. I wonder if VW just makes shitty clutches since you also had problems with one.
I still don’t understand the appeal of automatic transmissions in cars (despite that being all I own these days).
You just hit my nostalgia nerve. Damn I miss my 5-speed.
Yeah, and EVs have essentially killed that. And no, a “manual transmission” on an EV isn’t the same at all, I know those are fake gears and I’m having none of it.
Most EVs have barely any gearbox to speak of, usually one gear for reverse and one for forward. If you like simplicity and less stuff to break, an electric drive train is about as simple as you can get.
The battery does have some more complex tech in it. And of course, sadly, all the software stuff that doesn’t have much to do with the actual driving. That is usually the worst part.
Yeah, the software and data collection are pretty big parts of why I don’t want an EV. In theory, they should be dead simple, since the parts that can fail are limited to the steering and braking systems, simple electric motors, and the batteries. But there’s just so much artificial complexity in them that I really don’t want to bother with.
For a commuter, I just want to get to work and back, I don’t need driving aids (I drive the same route every day, and never at night) or a fancy screen, I just need something to listen to (could honestly just be my bone conduction headphones) and for the battery to not explode in my garage. I care more about fancy features in a family car, but I also care about range, and I need 400+ miles range for it to make sense (I do 800+ mile road trips at least once/year), so for now, my family car will be ICE/hybrid.
EVs should be simple. Just scale up an e-bike to go highway speeds and stick a bigger chassis on it so I don’t die if I get rear-ended. That’s it. I don’t need anything fancy, just keep it cheap and reliable.
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.
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.
I’ve been running Di2 since 2014 on my gravel grinder. It was a mullet setup with Ultegra DI2 / Wolftooth extender, XT cassette, SRAM 1x chainring and crank. I moved up to a clutched XT Di2 rear as soon as it was available. No dropped chains.
The shifting, now 10 years later, is AS GOOD as the day I got it. The battery, also 10 years old, still only needs charging 1-3 times a year depending on how much I’m riding that bike.
I went SRAM Eagle AXS for my bike packing bike.
It’s not as good as 11-speed XT Di2, even though my Eagle is XX. But the small drop in shifting performance (still sky high) is made up for by the ease-of-use. When I bought the bike, it was lightly used and setup as a single speed. Wireless electronic shifting made the switch easy. The most complicated thing was changing the freehub body to XD. After that it was put on the shifter, the derailleur and I was off to the races. I’ve taken it on days-long bike packing trips and I can do it all on a single battery, but I keep a spare on me because it’s so tiny.
My mountain bike has SRAM Transmission on it and it’s as perfect as shifting could ever be (also bought used because the bikepocalypse is real and I might as well take advantage).
With electronic shifting, I love that I can customize it to a level not possible with cabled shifting. I like that I can choose the speed of the shifts, which button does what, and I have my Shimano and SRAM bikes setup to match each other: same buttons for higher/lower gears and the same hold-for-3 multi-shift behaviour.
Now, bear in mind that when I get on my cabled-bikes, I don’t really think “boy this sucks” - but I maintain them all well.
Electronic shifting is incredible. I would never go back for my main bikes unless it gets all cloud-subscribers-enshittified (which is highly probable LOL).
But, being honest, it is truly a luxury and in no way needed. Any bike being ridden is a great bike.
AMA else. I’m here for it.
Aside: hilariously this is the Shimano semi-wireless Di2 in this article which is part of the sad decay of Shimano in general (I’m looking at you unreliable-shimano-power-meter and crank arms coming unbonded). The most popular wireless electronic kits are SRAM and, if I understand it correctly, they’re not affected by this particular issue. Doesn’t mean hackers won’t find one of course!
It’s a weight weinnie thing, you can save a couple grams. Electronics will never be as reliable as a cable though, too much vibration, temperature changes and moisture will eventually wreck stuff.
It’s not a weight weenie thing. In fact from my search it actually usually weighs slightly more. Most of what I’m reading suggests that it’s actually more reliable in adverse conditions than mechanical, or at worst that it’s roughly equal but different.
Having ridden DI2 for over 10 years, in the Canadian winter, with salted roads, I have to believe you’ve never used/maintained/serviced an electronic drivetrain.
The mechanical parts will fail as equally quickly - in the same places - if not maintained.
I’ve not yet had an electronics failure on my three electronic drivetrains. Mechanical bits will wear out as per usual.
Until the recent influx of low-cost electronic group sets, the ones on sale from SRAM and Shimano were high-end enough that they were/are incredibly reliable with the exception of the first generation external Di2 Dura Ace battery which had a poorly designed mount that would indeed cause issues over time. The internal battery remedied that issue.
It’s exactly as (un)secure as I expected. It’s a wireless device made by bike part manufactures… can’t expect better, realistically.
Still, I wouldn’t recommend someone against buying one because of this. The threat model for cyclists is getting maimed by vehicles or psychopaths laying booby traps out there. Hackers messing with my gear shifting is the least of my worries.
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