12 Speed: Progress Or Excess?

Dear Uncle Dave

Since SRAM introduced the Eagle 1×12 a couple of days ago the comments section in various social media have been flooded by hatred. In my opinion, more so than in days passed. Are people growing tired of advancement in technology that they don’t need to buy? Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t trade my current bike for what I used to ride back in 1996 but I kind of miss being able to use my old wheels on my new bike (since they are true and work perfectly fine) even though they have an axle “standard” that is now deemed obsolete by the manufacturer. Is the industry in the wrong track or are we (the riders) stuck in a rut?

Cheers/ I don’t care
Skickat från min iPhone

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Hi Dave, 

What’s up with this backlash against 1×12? Bigger front chainring while still being able to crawl uphill at my usual pace because of the larger cassette, sign me up (in about 3 years when I can pretend to afford it)! Surely this is innovation at its finest within the cycling industry, but people seem scared of progress.

Please can you explain the hate?

All the best,
A Future 1×12 User 

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Dear Sfami/FU:

I’ve sat on this for a few weeks because I honestly have no idea what to think. On one hand, who cares? New bikes are going to continue to come with expensive gizmos and we shouldn’t let that distract us from the enjoyment of our current bicycles. On the other hand…

Let’s start by looking at the history of mountain bike drivetrains. Until very recently, the rule was that road bikes drove the gear wars and mountain bikes followed a few years later once Shimano decided the dirty slobs who rode them needed some attention. We can best illustrate the advancement through the development of Deore XT, which generally indicated the mainstream acceptance of each system (pieced together from here and here).

1987 – 6 Speed (Lasted 2 Years)

1989 – 7 Speed (Lasted 4 Years)

1993 – 8 Speed (Lasted 6 Years)

1999 – 9 Speed (Lasted 11 Years)

2010 – 10 Speed

Until recently, the time between gearing changes was getting longer, not shorter. We were given time to wrap our heads around the change, slowly make our way over to the new standard, ride that stuff for years and years, and then, finally, be ready when a new standard was proposed. I’d hardly describe it as a glacial pace of change, but it was slow and steady and it generally worked out pretty well for everybody.

Then we got SRAM XX1 in mid-2012, the system was thrown into disarray and people kind of freaked out. Everybody had something to say. Some good, some bad. But it wouldn’t be Uncle Dave if we didn’t focus on the bad:

Why do we need a new cassette standard just so that we can get one less tooth?

Why don’t they just make 10 speed cassette with the same range?

What is this one chainring bullshit?

Why is this sh!t so expensive? It’s one extra cog? It’s made of aluminum? Why is everything so terrible?

Those gripes account for at least 90% of the complaints that people had about SRAM and their 11 speed system. I happen to think that some of these claims are somewhat valid, both then and now. Why couldn’t we make this work on the existing cassette body standard and why didn’t somebody throw a bone to all of the 10 speeders (many of whom who had just made the change) and why does it need to be so expensive? It was kind of maddening for a little while, but we moved on. Slowly. Lower cost options appeared. Shimano eventually jumped on board. The aftermarket built the wide range 10 speed stuff that a bunch of people wanted. The shitstorm died down and everybody seemed pretty happy.

But let’s amend our chart with the most current data.

1987 – 6 Speed (Lasted 2 Years)

1989 – 7 Speed (Lasted 4 Years)

1993 – 8 Speed (Lasted 6 Years)

1999 – 9 Speed (Lasted 11 Years)

2010 – 10 Speed (Lasted 2 Years)

2012 – 11 Speed (Lasted 4 years)

2016 – 12 Speed (???)

If I were to design change to maximally piss people off, this would be it. I’d set a relaxed, somewhat predictable schedule and lull people into a sense of complacency. I’d drop an arguably overdue change (10 speed) and I’d give everybody a bit of time to process and accept that change. And then I’d hit them right in the f@cking face with a totally unexpected doozy of a change that required all sorts of really fancy, expensive sh!t (11 speed). I’d laugh as everybody felt inferior, poor, frustrated and lonely. I’d let that stew, simmer and fester for a few years. I’d wait until everybody had stopped complaining and finally widely accepted my last change… and then I’d hit them again with another drastic change, playing the same notes that pissed people off in the first place, at a moment when change is even less necessary.

Insanely expensive? Oh hell yes.

Seemingly possible to do without requiring a new standard? Proven to be the case.

Sold in a way that suggests the old stuff is kind of crappy and anybody that continues to ride it is sort of an idiot? Of course. That’s just ‘marketing.’

Now, SRAM isn’t the only company that saddles us with change we haven’t asked for. You would have to be an idiot to suggest that Shimano only undertook change that made sense and had the best intentions for the consumer (their chainring bolt circle design department is enough to prove that they actively hate cyclists). But over the years, despite the odd misstep, Shimano has cultivated a reputation that they care. If you ignore rapid rise, dual control, biopace and dozens of bolt circle patterns, there are very few changes that Shimano has launched that have inspired any sort of uproar. If anything, we accuse Shimano of being too conservative and taking too long to give us the things that we demand (through axle hubs and disc brakes are two pretty great examples). They seem to take their sweet-assed time and get around to releasing things when they are good and ready and they seem to put a lot of thought into compatibility and the repercussions of messing with things.

This is exactly the kind of company that you want deciding on standards for your bicycle.

And SRAM is not like this at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I love SRAM. I’ve loved them to varying degrees over the last 15 or so years. They’ve made some great products. They’ve pushed others to up their game. They’re…well…they’re American. They want to be the best and make the best and it doesn’t really matter what anybody (even those a$$holes buying their sh!t) think about it. And sometimes…how can I put this delicately…well…sometimes they don’t appear to be a company that spends a lot of time sitting around and worrying about the impacts of their actions. Our long term interests don’t seem to factor highly into their decision making process.

Read this quote from here:

“Sometimes people, including ourselves, need time to acclimatize to change. When we looked at XX1 originally there was a fair bit of internal stress about the aesthetic change that XX1 had…. People getting used to these things slowly has made it easier for us. Can you go bigger? Yeah, you can go bigger, you can go more. Any of these things are possible, but we try to understand how much are people going to take, and I think that if you look at things like hub standards right now people have pretty clearly told me they don’t want any more… People have had enough.”

This sounds like a pretty great justification for not moving forward with 12 speed. Instead, the guy who said these things speaks on behalf of the company that within the last year has destroyed wheel compatibility by adding a few millimeters to our hub widths and foisted an extra cog upon us that nobody asked for. Will these things make our bikes ‘better?’ Lighter? Faster? Probably. But at what cost? I read that statement and I lose all trust in what those people are up to. What does he mean? Is he suggesting that Boost is a stop gap? That 12 speeds is some sort of short term solution until they sense we’ll accept more? What kind of delusional person admits that “people have had enough,” just before forcing another unwanted change upon them? This is crazy.

I read this Richard Cunningham piece a few weeks ago and I really liked it. I had to read the comments to fully understand his argument, but I liked it. And I’m going to steal his point and relate it here. A 12 speed drivetrain is not revolutionary. It’s literally just adding one extra thing to the thing that you already make. Even a pie plate sized cog isn’t all that new of an idea. As somebody in the NSMB comments pointed out, Shimano was kind of doing something similar years ago, they just weren’t quite clever enough to think it would fly with anybody other than recreational cyclists. There are dozens of companies that have the technical skills to create a 12 speed drivetrain. Two of these have the reach to push it through the industry. And only one of them has the balls to do it in this sort of fashion. This is not a leap in technology. It’s a leap in hubris, marketing and acceptance of risk sold to us as a groundbreaking technology. And I resent that. The chutzpah of a single company should not be a reason for a sweeping change across our whole sport.

As they say, great power comes with great responsibility. When you wield a company large enough to change the entire bicycle industry with the snap of your fingers, you owe it to all of us to consider the impacts and get things right. The turmoil created by this change is a great way to make money and build market share, but we shouldn’t have to bear the consequences of one company blowing everything up to get one over on another company. You can argue that we need to embrace technology or that nobody is forcing us to buy this stuff or any other number of arguments that get thrown around. But these changes represent more than just an evolutionary change with incremental performance improvements. It’s expensive wheels that no longer fit all of our bikes (ya ya, I know you don’t need boost for this, but please). It’s compatibility issues each time we need a new chain, cassette or derailleur. It’s ratcheting up the cost of this sport into insane levels. For some of us, this is not worth the trade-off and we have a right to voice our opinions because eventually, whether we want to or not, we’re going to get dragged down this path, leaving a trail of parts and standards in our wake.

To put this another way, I remember one of my engineering professors explaining that the hard thing about engineering isn’t building a bridge…any idiot with some rebar and concrete can do that…the hard thing is figuring out if the bridge needs to be built.*

In my eyes, this was not a bridge that needed to be built.

Sorry,
Uncle Dave

*Obviously, it’s not Engineers that get to decide if a bridge gets built. Those decisions are made by politicians trying to appease industries that paid for the election campaign. This is just a fancy way of saying that the hard part of engineering is managing the impacts of what you are doing and dealing with the humans that want to kill you when you get things wrong.

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Is Dave less grumpy on other platforms? Tune in and see. @ReallyUncleDave,(twitter) or @davetolnai.  (Instagram). And keep those questions flowing to [email protected]

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This week’s winner (yet to be decided at press time) gets a Giro Montaro helmet. Equipped with MIPS and tested on real human skulls, the Montaro provides ample coverage, an integrated, removable mount for your GoPro and 92 vents to keep you cool. Actually it might be fewer than 92, but it has vents.

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