the bikes are getting the better of me at work.

I recommend a sledgehammer

Yeah I don't touch them all that much atm. I mostly just email about them.

too many eBikes?

That is certainly a big piece of the puzzle, yeah.

what else? Campagnolo?

I hope this email finds you well.

I’ve ordered an Ultegra Di2 R8170, how much hassle is setup going to be?

In their way, Campy "situations" are simple because the right answer is almost always quote out the really expensive thing involving whatever new Campy components it takes, plus I deal with relatively little of that.

My bike mechanic friend told me that fragile ultra-light components used to be the bane of his existence... Now it's ebikes 🤣

@Erlkoenig in my (limited) experience the high end components are easier to handle because better quality and less corrosion

@Erlkoenig Yeah that about sums it up. Though in fairness it might be more "ebikes and the companies that make them and ebike users."

and more likelihood it’s less than 30 years old and installed by someone who knew what they were doing

@Michael Supposedly it was more complicated when the ultra-ligtlht craze was new and companies didn't know what they were doing

@NathanKnutson So that means just replacing instead of repairing expensive components?

no no, the problem with Campa is you need specific tools to install and remove stuff

I once had a campa crankset which required a bearing puller to remove

@NathanKnutson I considered working for an ebike drivetrain company. My bike mechanic friend said "great, then I can annoy you with my problems because the company is really unhelpful" 🤣 Would have been fun but I didn't apply because the office is in the middle of nowhere

@Michael The modern ones just need a big allen key driver 😄

The bike shop world is still in the middle of its adjustment to ebikes, tbh

In the long run it's probably going to be a great thing. More users willing to pay what it takes to make their premium-priced bikes go, and understanding that doing so takes a real skillset and time. In the moment we're still stuck in, its total fucking chaos.

Plus it's really unclear in the US where things are going to land with all this insurance premiums business.

Perhaps ebikes are a ploy by the automotive industry (Bosch?!) to make bicycles so complicated that customers will switch to cars

Perhaps. Counterargument being that they're acting like getting people willing to pay 100k is their only path to solvency.

It works for selling cars!

@Erlkoenig Complicated? I can think of several people who just wouldn't be biking if there were no e-bikes. And the complications they mention are coming from the bike side of the e-bike (mostly related to chain/cassette maintenance/wear and suspension fork), not the Bosch one. But in their mind, maintenance is something to be done by a professional, not by them.

The paradox of ebike service from a shop/business perspective is that it's this massive potential black hole of time/money/exposure to deal with them, but if you do it right there's something there in terms of demand. There's a needle to be threaded.

@NathanKnutson How "disparate" is the e-bike market in the US? I have the impression that with brands like Aventon, Radpower, there's much more low cost offering that what we see in Europe. In Belgium, my impression is that if you don't have a Bosch motor, finding LBS that can maintain it is very complicated - even for Shimano (and Specialized have so many specific parts that you need to go to a Specialized shop anyway).

And also the lesser power requirements seems to make cheap, powerful hub motors viable.

@Rеnаud Yeah super good question. One of the dynamics at play in the US is that all the direct-to-consumer brands are totally overloaded with service/support needs from consumers directly and absolutely love it when bike shops they don't have any consensed-upon relationship with are willing to deal with their bikes. But from an LBS perspective, it's usually nebulous whether you're going to profit in any meaningful way in those interactions after you factor in all the communication and diagnosis.

LBSes basically eat it in a lot of those service interactions. The hours rack up and even though consumers don't understand this, they really need to be netting 75, 100usd per hour to be in a good spot. So it's hell, basically.

But, to answer the question, from a consumer perspective it may be difficult to find a shop willing to help you with your DTC ebike, but from a shop perspective you can probably do it if you think it's worth it, and it may be worth it if you play your cards really right, but it also risks being a huge black hole of time.

There's a lot of levels to the question. At some point in the future it will probably be normal in every bike shop everywhere to crack open a motor hub to change out the reduction gearing. At the present, it's still intimidating and weird in a lot of shops, and getting the right parts isn't always easy. But there are now literally millions of those hubs around, so the wave will crest.

One of the really tricky parts about ebike service generally is that in the old world of bike shop operations, you checked in a bike and you were able to resolve most or all of the ambiguity quickly in terms of giving the customer an estimate on costs. Sometimes it goes over but that's the game. In ebike world, diagnosis often takes a very long time, and tearing apart bikes to deal with internal issues also takes a long time, so delivering any kind of accurate time estimate up front is difficult

Thanks for the insight. How standardised are these DTC e-bikes? When reading the specs of Aventon or Radpower, it gives me the impression to be accurate enough to reassure customers (ex: hydraulic disc brakes), but vague enough to allow them to swap components depending on procurement costs?

That sounds much like automotive service and repair. Is it a viable business there since cars cost so much more and customers are thus willing to pay more to maintain them?

@NathanKnutson And is the approach "pay for the estimation if you don't do the repair" not accepted by customers? It seems to be a common place in many other sectors.

Automotive and motorbike parts are also considerably longer lived.

Can you massively over-estimate the cost for bikes you find troublesome? It sounded like those tasks hardly pay for the expenses, so you would not lose any business that's worth it.

Sorry, by the way for such naive things "why not easily do". I expect it's not that easy, but hearing why that's so helps to understand.

The standardization question is so tricky. In some sense a lot of the DTC bikes are somewhat modular, meaning in the abstract there probably is a path to fixing them with parts not originally intended, hook it all up and it goes. But to deliver professional quality service you need to play within the ecosystem the OEM brand is creating, basically.

it's complicated. The drive system makers (Bafang is a big example) use a business model where their customer is bike brands, period. Their job is fill orders for X thousand hubs, Y thousand displays, etc.

Anything else and they would get bogged down. It's understandable.

But conversely, the systems are built to be modular and the pathways are there to service them by doing clever things. kind of.

@Rеnаud Sometimes yes sometimes no. I would say US shops are still figuring out how to make those interactions/situations work.

@gschenk I think in the really long run yes it's viable, but we're still in the shake out period.

@gschenk Over-estimating is a possible approach and is probably a good one in many situations. There's a lot of ways it gets sticky though. In the old paradigm, it was more or less normal for a shop to eat it when something takes longer than expected but "shouldn't" have, or in other words with the benefit of hindsight yes we should have known this thing wasn't compatible with that thing or we should have tried X approach first so we're not going to charge you for that 2 hours wasted.

In ebike world, that calculus is all different.

If we thought X problem was likely a connectivity problem so we spent 90 minutes eliminating those possibilities before we figured out the motor controller is toast, is that really our fault? Who pays for that 90 minutes?

@gschenk The other thing about needing to over-estimate is that it just creates all these high-stress, high-cost, oppositional-feeling interactions that historically weren't part of the gig. That doesn't make it wrong but it's a huge change and feels externally imposed.

Another way of looking at it is that basically for every ebike with a drive system other than Bosch and Shimano, in a shop context you fix it by getting parts from the bike brand that made it, though in theory there are other ways.

But is getting part from a DTC brand "easy", or does it comes with a service agreement that creates a series of other complications?

If they have it to send it's easy. They love it when LBSes are willing to put hands on their problems.

(from a European perspective, DTC brands seem to either be totally proprietary - ex. Cowboy - or use more standard standard parts than the big players that mostly use their in-house brands)

@Rеnаud I meant all the repair issues with diagnosing the drive systems, weird error codes etc. The stuff that eats up the bike mechanics' time

Perhaps we need better diagnostics tools to find electrical errors. E.g. to identify broken connections. Some could even be built into the e-bike display. But the industry was never good with that

They are essentially proprietary, but they're basically in a position of wanting to enlist the help of all the shops they can possibly get. They basically always want to establish those relationships. Their own support infrastructure is drowning.

A way of thinking about it could be "proprietary unless you're willing to nerd out or be a prodigy." If you're willing to nerd out or be a prodigy, you can perhaps figure some other stuff out. That's part of what makes some of the conversations tricky.

The hilarious thing is that in the long run, the DTC modular-ish systems are probably more future-proof than the totally closed ones.

@NathanKnutson Indeed, I remember there was a question about it and it looked like the low-cost systems were mostly using analogous signals and there was a high degree of interchangeability.

@Rеnаud Yep, hypothetically that's often the case, and yet from a shop perspective there are going to be questions like "we know or suspect this motor controller is toast, so we need to get a new one, which one is a drop-in replacement and who do we get it from and whose word are accepting that it's going to be a truly correct replacement?"

*are we

sounds like we need standards and OBD2 on eBikes

yay, my new bike frame is on its way :)

let’s hope they also send the other components soon. Wheelset and cassette have already arrived

The strong consumer rights, with 2 years warranty, in Europe is probably protecting bike shops here. Consumers have a direct claim through the seller that the problems tend to stick much more to DTC companies.

Even generous warranty handling in the US is much more of hassle for consumers. Here it's more or less inform the dealer and it's their problem, including shipping.

@Criggie We had to ban Nerf guns after people doing work were getting hit by people goofing off.

Sounds great but what if someone wants to buy an ebike from amazon that doesn't cost anything, never works right, and is only good for a service life of 20 hours?

@NathanKnutson not fit for purpose and Amazon (the seller) will have to ensure you get your Gewährleistung (warranty, but by law)

here in Austria within the first 6 months the seller has to prove that the defect didn’t exist from the start, after 6 months you have to prove

@Michaelcomelately there must have been a large Nerf gun stash in the tech space of my company. But then came COVID and some new office furniture and now it's gone

There was a conspiracy (myself among it) to slowly hide all the ammunition from the participants.

@Michael consumers also have two weeks where they can return it for a full refund and no shipping fees (for expensive products). It's a major disincentive for shops to sell rubbish as the returns devastate their margin.

>It's a major disincentive for shops to sell rubbish as the returns devastate their margin.

@Michaelcomelately we have a 3d printer in the lab, which is said to have been bought only to print more, and better, munition.

RE: "shops not selling rubbish" That sounds nice.

Sounds like a good set of laws that we'll probably never have here.

There's still lots of rubbish sold... Companies always find a way to weasel out of responsibility

@Michaelcomelately THere's an assumption right there.....