Is it just me, or are there seemingly far more people trying to invest and profit off bikeshares than there are using them?
I've lived in several cities in europe and i'm not actually sure i've ever seen anybody using them. Yet there seems to be tons of competing companies putting out bikes in the street.
On top of that, they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The first I'll hear of a new company is seeing a new colour of bike.
The idea is sound in practise, but people seem to place great value owning their own transportation and the flexibility it affords them.
In Montreal, the figure ranges from 600,000 (May) to 900,000 trips (July) from a fleet of 7,500 (there are no bikes from mid-November to mid-April). They're everywhere.
Companies targeting great markets fail all the time due to other factors. It not like all that needs to happen is someone point their finger at a good market and magically money starts piling up.
Great link, thanks for sharing. A couple more stats for other readers here:
- In May 2019, bike share users took about 218,400 trips on a fleet of about 4,400-5,100 bikes. (~43 trips per bike average during the month)
- Around 95,000 individual users
- ~2 trips per individual user during the month
So, realistically not that great on a per-user basis and it seems like a lot of users are only trying it out a few times or grabbing a bike once in a while. That meshes pretty well with the idea that people who find themselves using the service frequently probably just buy a bike.
> I think a lot of people start riding the share bikes before decidin
I don't mean to sound elitist but riding BSOs is the surest way to turn people away from biking - and these bikeshare one look worse than the mamacharis ridden in Tokyo. In anycase, considering the bike culture of Seattle, I doubt there is a big overlap b/w the two kind of riders - casual and dedicated commuters.
It isn't just you. In a capital rich environment (where getting money for new ventures is easier than normal) a single success (even if it is just perception) and a low barrier to entry, can lead to many copycat companies appearing. And yes, they over saturate the market, and no you can't easily tell which will win and which will lose from the outside.
For the "serial entrepreneurs" this is an easy way to stay employed (it can be surprisingly hard to get a job at BigCorp with CEO on your resume). These folks might just start a new company, raise some money, and voila they are once again on an "incredible journey."
In my experience for each "successful" exit (where the investors made some money) you get a ticket for one free "future" company from those investors. Once you don't have enough tickets to get another company funded you either have to change venues (new people, less history), or change markets (also new people but can be in the same locale).
> it can be surprisingly hard to get a job at BigCorp with CEO on your resume
Why do you think that is? It's so common to hear advice that bigco's will always want to hire people w/ Startup experience, but does that not extend to the founders?
Presumably a C-level is expected not to be satisfied with stepping down to a 'lesser' position, especially if those in charge of hiring at bigcos are the types who aspire to C-level status and thus see a rejection of C-level status as a rejection of their whole philosophy.
There might be at least the perception that the CEO will spend most of their tenure plotting their next startup (and quite possibly poaching employees and intellectual property on the way out). Think Anthony Levandowski.
Are there any well known cases of startup CEOs who were wildly successful as employees in another company?
I'm not arguing with the rule, but one notable exception is Kevin Systrom who stayed with Instagram for years (growing it from 30 million users when the acquisition was announced to over 800 million). He discusses the choice to stay, and the reactions from others in the company, in this interview: https://tim.blog/2019/04/25/kevin-systrom/
I can only speak for places where I've worked and hired folks, but the consensus seemed to be that people who seek out the CEO role are highly correlated with a need to control everything and less well correlated with "team players" (or people who can work with peers in a give and take sort of situation). In acquisition scenarios such companies are sometimes much more keen on keeping the VP of Engineering ("get things done") person than the CEO ("I'm the boss") person.
That and the cited "common knowledge[1]" that the population of CEOs contains a higher percentage of sociopaths than the general population. I have yet to work at a company that considered sociopathic characteristics as a "positive" for the company.
[1] I really have heard this from multiple sources but have yet to find any well executed study that shows it to be actually true so I treat such pronouncements with a bit of skepticism. I have heard more than a few people who are disgruntled at losing their job will blame it on their boss being a sociopath. Such externalization of causes feels good psychologically but it is also self serving.
> In acquisition scenarios such companies are sometimes much more keen on keeping the VP of Engineering ("get things done") person than the CEO ("I'm the boss") person.
I think it's less "The Boss" than the fact that the CEO is generally more marketing/finance focused (far less relevant after a buyout as the purchasing company already has that established) than the CTO or VP of Engineering.
There are, of course, exceptions where a company gets bought specifically to install their CEO in the CEO role of the purchasing company.
There is such a series of studies - but they were all done by the same PI, who has built his career on redefining "sociopathy" over-broadly, more or less to enable him to have headlines like "20% of CEOs are sociopaths!"
edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Is it because I'm lampooning a "common knowledge" that people like? For pete's sake, the research paper that spawned this meme even got retracted by the authors: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23744006.2016.12...
Big corps usually want people who do what they are told to do. An employee with startup experience has shown that, a lot of founders are probably not good followers.
I make regular use of bike share -- I have 2 bus options to take me home, one drops me off 2 blocks from home, one drops me off 2 miles from home. When I take the farther bus, I usually use a bike-share bike for those last 2 miles (the route is on a dedicated bike path).
Works great for me and apparently someone uses the bike in for their commute in the mornings since the bike is usually gone in the morning when I get to the bus stop.
In my city (Milan, Italy) bike-sharing is an extremely common solution.
I feel like the business model is the main problem. Low margins high-costs (you frequently need to replace thousands of bikes) and basically no moat.
Every few years a new startup can enter the marketing with a better bike. The incumbents have to improve their or risk losing the entire market in a matter of weeks.
>Low margins high-costs (you frequently need to replace thousands of bikes) and basically no moat.
the story of the sharing economy right there. I seriously don't know how bike / taxi / scooter rental companies have become a favourite of tech investors. It seems like some Robin Hood scheme to distribute money from investors to customers
It's genuinely less hassle. Where do I park my bike? How do I prevent it from being stolen? It got a flat tire, what do I do? These seem like simple questions but bike sharing provides such a simple solution to them, plus more: you caught a ride to the park but don't want to pay for a taxi back? Missed the bus? Need to get to a meeting a few blocks away but don't want to arrive sweaty from a run? The answer is there's a share bike already within sight of you that you can rent for (literally) pennies in seconds.
(They're also pretty heavy for anything but short distances and not always in great condition. And at least in Berlin where I lived you can get your own bike for $50 or so, which I had. But I still like the idea.)
For example, why wouldn't someone just buy a bike?
If you buy a bike you lose some flexibility. With bike sharing I can take the bus to work, take a bike to my meeting and then decide whether to take the bus or bike home depending on the weather and my plans. I can also do things like take the bus into town and then take the bike from the bus stop to the place I'm going, or bike into town and take the bus home with all my shopping.
I live in a crowded European capital city (Bucharest) and one of the big reasons for me not buying a bike is that I don't have enough available place. I personally live in an one-bedroom apartment (before that I used to live in a studio) and yes, I could probably fit a bike somewhere around the place but that would be pretty inconvenient. I also live on the 8th floor and a regular bike doesn't fit in my building's elevator, so that would mean me having to carry it 8 floors up and down each time I wanted to ride it.
My gf does have a bicycle but for the reasons I mentioned above she decided to keep it at her office, which is at walking distance from where we currently live (about 10-15 minutes).
Seems like a subscription to their BikeMi system costs 36€/year for unlimited free rides (up to 30mins/ride), so quite cost competitive with bike ownership. This is becoming common in main European cities (I know of Brussels, Paris and Lisbon).
I've pondered that question too. Something like Uber or Lyft works partly because of the cost and burden of car ownership. It's attractive to use someone else's equipment if you don't have to buy, maintain, finance, fuel, insure, and store (park) similar equipment yourself, to the tune of thousands of dollars per year.
But then you look at bike ownership. I almost want to put "bike ownership" in quotes because even the mere phrase makes it sound so much more serious and demanding than it is. It's so easy and cheap, it seems obvious you would just do that. Or put it this way, I don't find myself going "I just don't want & can't handle all that responsibility of a bike!" It's like, boy you better not get any houseplants then, that much responsibility will stress you right out!
The 'problem' you're looking to solve is not the hassle of bike "ownership" but bike access. If I take the car or bus to work I can't then take my bike to meet a client. If I take my bike into town I can't then take the bus home if the weather turns bad or I have a lot shopping to carry. If I take my bike into a 'bad' part of town to go to a bar I have to worry about the very real chance that it won't be where I left when I want to go home at night. Bike sharing solves all these problems.
If you take the bus home because of bad weather one day, and leave your bike at work, it's there for you to go meet a client the next day! :P
No but seriously. Sounds like your transit agency doesn't have bike racks on the buses. That's what enables the integration with transit. Around my area you can take a bike on the bus or light rail.
All the other problems have pre-existing solutions though too:
Groceries to carry → Get panniers, and don't buy more than they can hold (you can always get more tomorrow, and it'll be fresher).
Rain → Wear rain gear.
Bad part of town → Own a modest bike and a good lock.
The extreme mode flexibility you mention sounds nice, but I've never found I've needed it. With a little advance planning and the extra bits above, you can just commit to one mode.
> I have to worry about the very real chance that it won't be where I left [it]
On the other hand, a personal bike that is only half as shitty as the typical bikeshare will be extremely loyal and never leave you for another rider.
But I get it, it's the public transport freedom which people who never experienced it rarely understand: if you always return to your personal vehicle having to do so feels perfectly fine. But when you got accustomed to ad-hoc modeswitching itineraries, being confined to returning to your personal vehicle feels strangely limiting, despite all the "wherever, whenever" of your own car/bike/boat.
For me, the use cases are very different. I use rental bikes mostly as a complement to public transport - a metro/tram/bus line might take me 90% to where I need, then I'll get some bike in the area to make the 10% left rapidly. I also own a bike, but I mostly use it for local trips or pleasure rides. Plus, unlike the rentals, it's not electric.
> But then you look at bike ownership. I almost want to put "bike ownership" in quotes because even the mere phrase makes it sound so much more serious and demanding than it is.
Well, depends. Bikes take shitload of space inside the house, which in a city is often a low double-digit m² flat for singles, or slightly larger double-digit m² for families. Unlike cars, you can't keep bikes outside for too long, as they can get stolen quickly. Then, unless you know how and like doing it yourself, you'll end up bringing it into a repair shop for checkup and maintenance just as often as you would a car. At least you don't have much insurance paperwork.
Interestingly, a thing about Uber/Lyft is that the number of cars is limited because they are based on converting existing private cars to hired use. So Uber/Lyft don't eliminate private cars. The number of bike shares that can be pumped into a city is limited only by the capital that can be pumped in.
Judging by a billboard that I pass reasonably frequently, Uber is more than happy to "help" potential drivers without cars get them and start driving for Uber [0]. In theory, the number of cars available to Uber is also only limited by the capital that can be pumped in.
I don't know if the prices are currently subsidized, but there's no reason they couldn't be.
Like many of the other people to reply, I can only say that here in Helsinki the local council operates a scheme which is very very popular.
It costs €30 for a "season", and that gives you 30-minutes free ride from the bicycles you'll find all over the place in their stands. You can pay a small fee to get more time, or you can do what most people do which is to ride to a stand, and swap your bike for another.
The only problem with the scheme is that it only runs around the summer, but I guess fewer people are interested in cycling in the snow/ice-heavy part of the year.
I used the Boris Bikes in London 249 times last year, theres an annual pass that costs £90. I commute into the city by train so its a lot easier than using my own bike. In London at least the scheme seems fairly well used with around million hires a month in the summer months http://content.tfl.gov.uk/santander-cycles-quarterly-perform...
The main problem with bike shares is the ridiculously short time limit. If you could check one out for a few hours they’d be more useful, instead most are time limited to about 30 minutes. My sister used one once to bike by a lake front and she said she was stressed the whole time about not making it to the next station to reset the time limit before it expired.
They only charge an extra dollar or two to keep the bike longer. For most people it's not worth getting stressed about. I've used bikes shares in a several cities for 3+ hours and it was never a problem (although riding one of those crappy bikes for a few hours is kind of torture).
The main Dutch bike share system doesn’t have silly time limits. It has a fixed price of €3,85 (about $4,35) for a day. That allows you, for example, to cycle from a train station to a business meeting, park the bike there for a few hours, and cycle back to the station in the afternoon.
> i'm not actually sure i've ever seen anybody using them
As a datapoint, i almost crashed into someone riding one in London an hour and a half ago. The front lights on the Lime bikes are evidently not very reliable.
Oh no. My girlfriend and I recently rented some Lime bikes in Calgary.
The brakes on hers weren't reliable enough to go down hills, let alone stop in an emergency. Mine weren't much better.
We left appropriate reviews, and were able to tell the next rider which to use, but they really need a quick maintenance survey, even just for brake shape, and perhaps a "flag bike as dangerous" button.
Also found the e-assist awkward, particularly at low speeds around pedestrians.
Would ride again, but just double check the brakes/mainteance.
"they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The first I'll hear of a new company is seeing a new colour of bike"
Is that not the best marketing? Actually paying for inner city marketing is probably expensive, online marketing is probably going to reach more people that this isnt relevant to. If you're seeing the bike you probably are the target market and can see its a somewhat legit company (in the sense that they do actually have bikes at least).
I see the Santander Cycles used in London all of the time (not calling them by their slang name because #politics) - it flies in the face of the notion that you have to be dockless to succeed in bike sharing.
Honestly, I hate the litter these dockless sharing companies have spread across the city.
There's a definite network effect... its hard to justify riding a shared bike somewhere if you can't be reasonably sure there will be one for you to ride back when its time to return. Maybe you could cobble a trip together with multiple vendors in cities where there are competing systems, but thats more hassle and makes it difficult if you're buying a yearly pass or some other monthly discount.
If you want some real data from a large program with good public support, CitiBike in NYC publishes open ridership data: https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data
The tl;dr is that the system is very popular, and they're constantly expanding it - currently averaging around 62k trips per day on 12k bikes across 750 stations.
I own my own bike, but I'll use a Citibike for a one-way trip or to bridge a gap when I'm already out away from home without my bike. There is also a ton of utility for people who ride more casually, or don't want to carry bikes up stairs, or don't have room in their apartment, etc, etc.
I always find it shocking to hear that so many people think crowdfunded projects have no risk, that it's somehow similar to ordering stuff from Amazon. Especially when people invest more money than they are actually willing to lose.
Whose mistake is that? The customer for not understanding what they are into? Platforms like Kickstarter for not explaining it clearly enough?
I can't think of an industry that hasn't been affected by Chinese manufacturers trying to undercut American or European companies by short cutting the manufacturing process.
I just see the same thing with this bike company. Ignore all the rideshare stuff, the push to grow so fast and not having a sustainable product and its the same story. They took a standard Aero fram and tried to make it appear as a "high end" product. The problem is, once you've ridden a high end road bike you suddenly realize the amount of engineering and R&D that goes into those bikes to get them to perform at that level. You can't just reproduce that overnight, it takes time and a lot of money. From the article (and the scathing reviews of the bike) it didn't sound like they really tried to make a quality product, just another carbon Aero knockoff with a cool integrated stem. At that point, it was easy to undercut your competition on price.
The lessons are all too clear and which you see a lot of. You can't cut corners on products like this and sell it off as "high end" and expect to get away with it.
Source: I worked in the bike industry for almost 15 years. Had various stints with Specialized and Cannondale.
I didn't know this CEO was the same as from Bluegogo. When that bike share company entered the Bay Area market, they helped push out artists from a West Oakland warehouse studio called Lo-bot and were occupying it for maybe six months before disappearing. The place is still empty.
It's a shame that there's been little innovation from road bike manufacturers in the past 10 years or so. The last major innovation was aero carbon frames. Since then everyone is just copying each other and trying to improve by fractions of a percent for weight, stiffness, and efficiency.
Most of the value and innovation has shifted to the groupset suppliers, with Shimano taking the lion's share of the market and a few smaller players picking up scraps. When all the important components come from Shimano it barely matters who manufactures the frame and assembles the complete bike.
At this point road bikes are about as good as they will ever be within the limits of available materials and UCI rules. It would be nice if one of the big bike manufacturers would make their own high-quality components to compete with Shimano. Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races.
> It's a shame that there's been little innovation from road bike manufacturers in the past 10 years or so.
Are you not familiar with electronic shifting? Integrated components? Sure, frames have basically all consolidated down to a few similar model types, but I see that as a good thing. It means the market has all figured out that "this is the most aerodynamic frame possible". I mean honestly, what else would you expect their to be improvements on?
> with Shimano taking the lion's share of the market and a few smaller players picking up scraps.
Uhh SRAM would like to have a word with you...OTOH it's basically a duopoly (with Campy's lagging 3rd). This is a good thing because it means I can swap parts in and out as I please since Shimano/SRAM basically can fit on to any modern bike. I see this as a feature, not a bug.
> It would be nice if one of the big bike manufacturers would make their own high-quality components to compete with Shimano
You mean like every major bike brand is already doing? Trek with Bontrager, Specialized with Roval, etc. etc. Sure they aren't the shifting/braking components, but I'd rather have 30+ years of mechanical innovation behind progress on components than a frame manufacturer and assembler trying to do it. The reality is that most of the bike brands are providing high quality wheels, handlebars, accessories, etc. now, and that should be applauded.
FSA Also recently launched a drivetrain, and there are also other brake manufacturers (I'm an oddball who likes mechanical disk brakes so I pretty much have to look for them)
What kind of innovation are you expecting? Plenty of innovation is still happening in the realm of adding motors and batteries to bikes. Beyond that, what else is there to do with bikes? We're already deep into the realm of severely diminishing returns on weight and aerodynamics, and braking power is limited by physics. What else is there to improve? All I can think of is ABS.
Has anyone looked into a pneumatic powered bicycle? Is it way less efficient than a chain drive? What if you pedaled to compress air into a reserve tank that was then discharged to somehow propel the wheel(s)? That could soften the peaks and valleys of power and allow perhaps for regeneration during braking. With a large enough tank you could save up power during plains to propel you up large hills.
I'd think that a pneumatic bottle would have to be very large, and/or very heavy to store enough energy for a useful return, the heat lost from the compressed air would lower efficiency, and an air turbine that can provide usable power over a wide range of pressures from the bottle would add additional weight and contribute to inefficiency.
The fact that there are few compressed air hybrids is probably a good sign that it's not significantly better than batteries.
Few electric bikes even use regenerative braking, it's generally not worth the weight and complexity.
>Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races.
You've just described endurance bikes. but the reality is that the traditional bike design is still pretty much the best design, and anything radical has enough downsides and trade-offs to confine it to a niche market, so the endurance bikes still are pretty similar to any other road bike.
we've gotten really, really good at building bikes in the last 100 years. This year's model not being wildly different to last year's model isn't anything to complain about.
> Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races.
Every competitive road bike manufacturer is also offering a TT and/or tri model. Those are still governed by rules, but those rules allow far more radical designs. Cyclists looking for something faster than road UCI (but not quite a recumbent or velomobile) know where to get it, that market is not constrained by lack of options.
It's a shame that there's been little innovation from road bike manufacturers in the past 10 years or so.
If you want to stop, we've got hydraulic disc brakes. If you want to go, we can stick a motor on it. Don't want to maintain derailleurs? Get a 14 gear Rohlhoff internal hub. Don't want to maintain a chain? Get belt drive. Don't even want to go to the effort to physically push the mechanism to the next gear? We have electric shifting now.
None of this was available twenty years ago. The "innovation every 10 years" you're looking for happened well over 100 years ago. The low-hanging fruit was taken before your grandfather was born. But build a bike with brakes so good it will lift the back wheel in the pouring rain, and people still aren't satisfied. :-)
> Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races.
Recumbents are exactly that, but it's still very much a niche market. Furthermore, at any given component grade, a recumbent will cost more - and add a further premium if it's a trike.
I love recumbents but they're too expensive because they're almost all built by hand by a guy in a garage; never at scale. And that guy tends to go out of business fairly quickly and then you're stuck with an unsupported bike. I wish it weren't so but it is.
Recumbents have terrible visibility (can't see over cars), suck for really steep climbs and sprinting, and are kind of unsafe for fast group rides with multiple cyclists packed close together.
I think the main problem with recumbents is failing harder in borderline unridable conditions. On a conventional bike you can temporarily move body support to the feet for a section of pave, jump over potholes, fluidly transition to walking and back if necessary.
Just imagine recumbent cyclocross, that mental picture is all you need for understanding why recumbents are a niche. Most real life transportation use of bicycles is full of lesser versions of similar challenges.
I have been riding bikes for over 30 years and I absolutely love contemporary bikes. They are just amazing. I can't believe you're complaining about them. Just crazy. The incremental improvements have really layered up over the years into something fantastic.
A prime example of this was the Trek Y-Foil. It is surprising how much the entire bike industry is shaped by the arcane rules of a very conservative 119 year old European governing body.
Why bother innovating when its not needed? Expensive bicycles are in the same market as fancy watches. Its all just wealth signalling. Nobody needs 10% lighter frames, or 5% more aerodynamic shapes. If you want to drive faster or burn less energy you go electric, If you want health benefits you buy the shittiest heaviest bike you can find and pedal harder.
Don't get a shitty bike if you want exercise. Shitty bikes are unpleasant to ride, making the experience not fun, and discouraging you from doing more (and longer duration) riding.
Also, safety is important, and shitty bikes are less safe.
This response to the person ahead of you makes me think you either don't know much about bikes or you missed their point.
I think we all agree, buy something shitty and you get shit, especially with things you put between you and the earth. A medium quality bike, which costs an order of magnitude less than a "fancy" bike, will do literally everyone who isn't a cat 1-2 racer fine, objectively. Price difference is $1-5k for a mid range vs $10-20k for top of the line.
I don't think anyone is advocating for $300 walmart bikes here.
I don't understand your objections, nor do I see how you can infer that I don't know much about bikes.
Yes, the person I was replying to was advocating for department store quality bikes. I don't see how you can interpret it any other way. He literally said "shittiest heaviest bike you can find", not "$1-5k medium quality bike".
You could win the tour de france doing the road stages on a medium quality bike. (if you put good tires on it). Also given your price range, some of the objectively best bikes (meets weight minimum, good aerodynamics) are in the $5k range, and the more expensive ones are worse but have big name value!
That's definitely not true...at the level of the TDF, every gram of excess weight matters, and there's a vast weight difference between a cheap $5k bike and a "fancy" $20k bike.
If you're not at the TDF level, there's no point in spending more than $2k on a bike since the difference in weight won't matter.
It is true because weight is limited by the UCI limits. The bikes are so light now some riders have had to resort to adding extra weights to their bikes to pass the UCI inspection. The best rider on a $5k or $20k bike will still be in the mix regardless. I'd say they could even get away with a $2k bike.
It's not so much the weight but aerodynamics. The top aerobikes (not timetrial bikes) use about 10-20% less power than a non aerobikes at a speed of 45km/h (which is not a high speed during racing). That has actually been the big innovation in the last 5 years, the realisation that aero is more important than weight, except for the most extreme mountain stages. All the big manufacturers are now making aerodynamically optimized bikes.
Actually the rules restrict minimum weight and they often have to add ballast. And reducing weight does have diminished returns at some point, particularly on flatter sections. I think the weight obsession is more aimed at selling to amateurs than making pros faster.
I'd say so. although it markets 'comfort' as well as stiffness and low frameweight, i dont expect it to be super comfy. might be it's more aimed at granfondo riders (which are still timed events) or group riders racing for signposts with their buddies though.
A very well written article. I like the point about how the follies of the bike sharing business have actually got people to ride bikes. Before it was not an option to hire a bike for a day, nowadays that is a thing.
It takes a while for things to find their level. The 'Boris bike' is now a feature of London, the other bikes haven't established that niche in the streetscape.
The road bike was also innovative, if flawed. Plenty of bikes and plenty of bike groupsets are flawed when they first come out. It takes a couple of iterations to get right and the costs of getting it wrong are terrible.
Years ago in the days of the mountain bike craze a brand came out with a few of their own components including a bespoke freehub body. This did not last long on any given bike and it did not take long before the warranty returns aspect of the business fixing whole wheels took over. There was no scope to develop the brand when all hands are literally swapping tyres and tubes onto new wheels and getting them out to customers.
Sometimes bikes that don't actually work don't bounce back. During the mountain bike boom there was a shortage of Shimano components and a rising Yen. This made it hard to get the gears and brakes needed to build a bike. So European components might be substituted. And they would not actually work together, no matter how skilled the mechanic, no matter how new everything was, the gears would not shift and the brakes would not stop the bike.
Very few of these frankenbikes made it back. They just sat in sheds and garages, never to be ridden!
The SpeedX bike was not a bike that would be just dumped in the shed or bought as a well meaning gift. They could not rely on 90% of the problems not coming back.
They also were never going to do well with the cycling press. Or the industry. The cycling business is actually really conservative and there are chunks of it controlled by people who never actually ride..
> Bluegogo’s contribution alone was 800,000 bikes, impounded in cities across China – wave after wave of blue bikes, piled two high, sitting in construction sites and empty lots on the outskirts of megacities, waiting. Decaying.
> Zoom out from the specific, and you quickly start to drown in the enormity of it all. Millions of bikes, assembled by thousands of hands. Entire towns like Wangqingtuo, built around servicing a rapacious demand. Restaurants and hotels and supermarkets, constructed and opened and shuttered in what are now virtual ghost-towns. Countless families relying on the bikeshare industry to survive. Seats and spokes and tyres beyond number, consigned as fast as they were made to technicolour scrapheaps around China. All of it, this vast mound of human toil, left to rust and rot among bamboo and rubble.
I am continually facinated with China and it's people. But in instances like this I get a real feeling of looking into the eyes of Yog-Sothoth, the Gate and the Key.
This feels very typical of a Chinese "startup." Any company marketing its leadership on being some "whiz kids" is a red flag.
A gigantic amount of Chinese entrepreneurship is just about people trying to game the insane capital market in China under every pretext possible, without any genuine concern for the business being sound. Not much different from what you see in the US, except for even less curbs on outright fraud. After all, all of that came to China along with the first wave of "returnees" from US West Coast.
In this case, you have to admit, the company simply ran out of money, and you can not put that in any other way. Whether they would've or wouldn't have been descended upon by the communists wouldn't have changed anything about that.
I noticed a tendency that in China, whatever company can be called a substantial, solid business is much more likely to be privately owned, low profile, and kept as far away from capital markets as possible.
Best example — Bu Bu Gao group, the second in line after Samsung in smartphones, but is almost invisible.
Espressif recently went with a placement, but also very low profile, without much noise, and on a 3rd tier burse oriented to institutional buyers.
Allwinner, Rockchips — both companies are past their prime, but still super duper secretive with regards to ways of company's leadership.
> In this case, you have to admit, the company simply ran out of money
You seem to have skipped the paragraph with the little tanks. Arbitrary plot twist it out of a clear blue sky, would be too absurd even for an episode of South Park.
No I didn't. That has nothing to do with them simply not having a way to get profitable, and running out of initial capital. That would've happened invariably of then being raided or not.
I wonder how does Kickstarter deal with credit card chargebacks? Their support site basically says "talk to us directly please"[1], but it's common for chargebacks to be awarded to customers regardless of arguments provided by a merchant. Would they just consider it the cost of doing business or try to recover the money from the backed project?
The article challenges Kickstarter to refund their 5% commission when companies go bankrupt. Seems like the right thing to do and could win back more customer loyalty.
There are no noteworthy novelties in this kickstarted bike. I'd personally venture to lose some money if I saw some real innovation and I wouldn't bother even if they failed to deliver the end product or the company went bankrupt. Here we see only some Chinese copy work.
Oh man, I remember when SpeedX first came out. I can't describe it exactly, but it was an immediate red flag for me. Basically they tried to fix everything about buying a bike in one fell swoop and said it was going to cost less than other providers. If they were able to provide a superior experience to bike sizing, bike computer, wheels, frame, etc all in one fell swoop, then I would expect the overall product to be more expensive...not cheaper. Huge red flag.
> I can't describe it exactly, but it was an immediate red flag for me.
The universal playbook of all bike related crowdfunding campaigns: take a tiny innovation (or none at all, it's not strictly necessary to have something original), put it in a blender with everything that has become state of the art within the last decade or two and use it to impress those who have never experienced anything better than a walmart clunker from the falling edge of the original mountain-bike wave.
> At the time, early 2016, aero was the next greatest advance in the cycling tech space; like the Giant Propels and Specialized Venges it was pitched against, the Leopard featured a snugly tucked rear wheel, a wind-cheating profile and hidden cabling.
As a road cyclist - I'm no expert on this, but even in 2004 such a thing was becoming commonplace in Chinese CF frames and companies that were trying hard to copy Cervelo.
I think you're mistaken. In 2004 Cervelo had just began offering their Aero bikes, but they were aluminium, not carbon. See the Cervelo Soloist Team.
The manufacturers using carbon like Time, Look were not producing anything 'aero'. Giant's TCR (ridden by T mobile) in 2004 was carbon front triangle with aluminium seat and chain stays. And again, not 'aero'.
Meanwhile incredibly Detroit Bikes appears to be doing quite well. So well in fact that they're attracting multiple competitors in Detroit. Perhaps because they're not competing on price and some people still value American made?
Fascinating story. I wonder what happened to that game company with the little tank, it probably shutdown by the police as well... 4th June is a very sensitive word in China...
I've lived in several cities in europe and i'm not actually sure i've ever seen anybody using them. Yet there seems to be tons of competing companies putting out bikes in the street.
On top of that, they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The first I'll hear of a new company is seeing a new colour of bike.
The idea is sound in practise, but people seem to place great value owning their own transportation and the flexibility it affords them.