Andy in Germany
Guru
- Location
- Freiburg im Breisgau
It was ever thus. Many years ago, way back in 1936, E.B. White wrote a wonderful essay in The New Yorker titled Farewell to Model T - a sort of elegy to the simple days in his youth (he was born in 1899) when anyone could repair an automobile and you mail-ordered your spare parts through your Sear & Roebuck catalogue. And now we have bicycle shifting going electric - just try repairing that in your backyard on a sunny afternoon with the radio on and an open beer beside you...
The Elder Son has a theory that E-bikes and electric shifting are more to do with the manufacturers realising that bikes were too simple to fix, and they were losing money because spares aren't expensive enough, so they're training users to buy new components that will break sooner and can't be repaired at home, and are incompatible with other companies parts so users have to come back to them.