We’ve all been there.
Maybe it was you. Maybe it was someone you ride with. But we’ve all been there. You’re about to set off for a ride. Or maybe you’re deep in one, far from home, and you realise that, for some reason or another, your bike isn’t shifting. After a quick diagnosis, you realise one or more of your batteries isn’t working. At best, it’s just dead. At worst, it’s broken.
I first saw it firsthand a few years ago when I joined a buddy for a long ride in the thick of the Appalachian Mountains. We planned a metric century that counted some 7,000 feet of climbing. A sizeable day in the saddle. And all was well for the first twenty miles. The weather was perfect, the roads quiet, the leaves a beautiful palette of early autumn oranges, reds and browns. And then, out of nowhere, the battery powering my friend’s front derailleur died.
At the time, I had just started to think about what my next road bike might be (let’s face it: we’re always thinking about what our next bike might be) and over those last forty miles, I decided that, whatever it was, it had to have mechanical shifting.
Granted, electronic shifting has come a long way in the few years between that ride and this writing. But still, all too often, I see someone at the start of the ride, loading their bike back onto their car because, whether due to malfunction or user error (i.e, “I forgot to charge my batteries last night”), their bike is little more than a paperweight.
I’ve never experienced these issues because I’ve yet to make the switch to e-shifting. And, if I can help it, I never will. But my fear is that, someday soon, I won’t be able to help it. At least not if I want a higher-end bike.
Let me abundantly clear here: I’m not opposed to e-shifting, just like I’m not opposed to disc brakes (that’s another rant for another day). If those things make you happy, if they make you enjoy riding your bike more, then go for it. It’s your money. Spend it on whatever you want.
What I am opposed to is the bike industry’s slow creep toward the ubiquity of electronic shifting (and disc brakes). I am opposed to the fact that, likely within the next half-decade, I won’t be able to find anything above an entry-level road bike that doesn’t require batteries to work.
And, unless we’re talking about e-bikes—which are amazing and have levelled the playing field for countless people around the world, allowing them to enjoy the magic of bicycle riding—bikes shouldn’t require batteries to work.
In the modern age, batteries are a part of every cyclist’s life. The night before I go out on a long ride, I have to check and charge about half a dozen batteries: my bike computer, my rear light/radar, my front light, my heart-rate monitor, occasionally my camera, and, of course, my cell phone. But whether or not my bike works as it’s been designed and built is not reliant on a fully charged, fully functioning battery. So long as my cables and my chain are intact, my bike will work no matter what. The bicycle is a miracle of human ingenuity. I’ve argued before, and I’ll argue for the rest of my life, that the bicycle is in the pantheon of humankind’s engineering marvels. It is considered by many as the most efficient machine ever made. Two triangles sitting on top of two circles, its form and its function are both damn near perfect.
Well, primarily because the bike industry needs to survive. And the only way for the bike industry to survive is for us to continue buying what they’re selling.
Think about how many times in your life you’ve bought a new bike. For most people, that number is in the single digits. Of course, we bike nuts skew a bit higher, but it’s not like most of us are buying a brand new bike year after year.
And so what does the industry do? They create new technologies and then use marketing prowess to convince us that we absolutely need them. To wit, where there used to be two main categories of performance bike—road and off-road—there are now all-roads, aero, climbing, cross-country, tri/TT, downhill, enduro, trail, gravel, cross, and so on and so on and so on.
What the industry does is create solutions to problems that never existed in the first place.
When it comes to disc brakes, I get it. There was an actual problem that… well, I won’t say needed to be solved, but one that could be improved upon. Disc brakes offer more stopping power (and, as the ad-nauseam adage goes, “in rain and when you’re descending”), especially when they’re asked to stop carbon wheels. More importantly, they allow for a far wider range of tyre choice than the typical rim-brake calliper.
Great.
You could even argue that there was some necessity to the introduction and proliferation of gravel bikes. Whether consumers started riding gravel and the industry followed their lead, OR the industry planted its flag in The Spirit of Gravel in an effort to invent another subgenre of bike to sell us, can be argued until we’re blue in the face. But the fact is that masses of people started riding longer distances off-road than an average trail or cross-country bike would be suitable for.
But what problem does e-shifting solve?
More precise shifting? Okay. I guess. If you’re Wout van Aert. But for the rest of us, a well-dialled mechanically shifted groupset changes gears just fine. Sure, there is some maintenance involved with cable wear. But I’d rather swap cables once a year or so than deal with batteries all the time.
And while I’m ready to admit that on-the-fly trim adjustments are cool as hell, it’s not something that I’m willing to trade off for the idea that my bike requires battery power to even be ridden.
Again, and let me say this louder for the people in the back: if you love e-shifting, great. If you’ve become a convert, even an evangelist, I’m happy for you. Maybe someday, I’ll join your ranks. Sadly, it doesn’t look like I’ll have any other choice.
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