I do start to feel sorry for the engineers who have been told to make sure it works for 50 hours (because marketing team reckon that’s all it will be used for) and then getting the blame when loads of customers in Lockdowns are putting in many more hours than that and they are failing.
Anyone know how reliable the Peloton units are?
Shutdowns or not, if designers and makers of smart trainers don’t recognize the more intensive and frequent use they will see by now, there is no hope for us.
This current trend may be elevated, but it is nothing “new”. There should be no trainer dying in a single season (let alone a few months) even under the most frequent use in those times. That is a sign of terrible design, bad manufacturing or some combo of those.
My point, there should be no surprises here. Starting with testing formats and data expectations clearly defined by guys like Ray Maker and Shane Miller, the manufacturers should be doing their protocols at the very least. The fact that we see them testing units with clear problems, and then having to retest after firmware updates shows they are not testing with enough depth.
ETA: The demand on trainers may well be higher now than in years past. I doubt most people would grind away for an hour or more at SS and Thresh wattage with any real frequency. But with Zwift and other apps, we see people taking on harder and longer efforts with some regularity. Makers need to recognize this and improve their design and testing practices to handle this. I see these as expected use cases now, and it’s practical for people to expect trainers marketed for use with these apps to hold up to such use.
Couple that with what seems to be a relatively high failure rate across brands and models, and it seems to me that we have poor design that is not as robust as it should be, and potentially manufacturing that has or allows more deviation than is appropriate for proper longevity.
I think it is reasonable to expect at least 3 years of vigorous use of these trainers and would hope for over 5 in most cases. We see that in some cases, but the apparent number and frequency of failures well short of that seems to indicate one or more problems.
I suppose that we will obviously see more complaints than we would about successes but I agree abut what expectations are.
Interesting that Computrainers were built to last , back in the day, and nowadays…
Anyone know how reliable the Peloton units are?
No idea but I was wondering about wattbike which is designed for a gym and thus designed to be used continually for many hours a day. Expensive but if it stands the test of time…
i had forgotten about those!
Yeah, it’s honestly very disappointing especially when customer service is so poor as well. At least when Stages was having widespread problems their customer service and warranty were fast and helpful.
Right now I am 2 months into dealing with Garmin customer service over the scraping sound coming from my Tacx Flux S. I sent the video as they requested, then 2 weeks later they sent instructions on how to service the freehub body, which I did and the problem continued. Then I sent them another video with the sound still happening, explaining that the suggestion that they first provided didn’t work. At this point it has been 3 weeks. I periodically email them and receive the response “our engineering team is working on it”, then nothing.
It’s disappointing that most companies seem to be having well known issues that they don’t address. After this experience I would never buy another Tacx or Garmin product again, but what other option is there? Every manufacturer seems to have obvious flaws. I’m not opposed to paying $1,000-1,200 for a trainer that I know will hold up, but even those seem to be plagued with issues.
Agreed, CompuTrainers are an interesting case. They were ungodly expensive for their time, and have a great reliability track record. Still, they are somewhat “simple” in the design being wheel-on, with fewer parts and complexity when compared to modern wheel-off trainers.
We see people still using them today, in the at least some of the tough but expected use cases I mention above. So I feel that it is quite possible to make a device to meet the functional demands. And I think modern tech and manufacturing should allow that at practical price points we see already.
It’s just such a shame that one company decides to be THE manufacturer and does a very reliable sturdy version of a computrainer/wattbike.
I reckon that as word spread about the reliability then it would grab massive market share.
Personally I have a wheel on dumb trainer and rely on TR to give me Virtual Power. I get very dissuaded from spending a thousand pounds on something that may well go wrong in less than a year. I would be interested in buying something reliable…
I’d be a lot less worried about reliability if I could get replacement parts off the shelf. I strongly object to shipping 22kg trainers around the place (at my expense for Tacx!) and losing my trainer for 30 days (still counting!!!) when, if the thing was made with maintainability in mind, Garmin could have simply posted out a new pair of fans and I could have popped them on.
It seems that both the issues I have had are return to base if under warranty or throw away and buy a new one if out of warranty.
I recall a manufacturer of crank arms had an issue with them cracking, they simply sent me a new pair, I didn’t have to post my bike back! The new pair had been improved and didn’t suffer the same fate, even if they had I can still get parts now and won’t have to throw the bike away!!
This strikes me as a classic case of accountants triumphing over engineers. It should not be that hard to engineer a smart trainer where the failure rate is less than 1% a year. What I suspect it is, however, is more expensive than the manufacturers would like. Whether that is simple profiteering, or competition driving down prices to the extent where they don’t feel they can charge what they need to to make the units reliable, only they can say.
Sadly, I’m not convinced that’s true. Most consumers - across all products - are comparatively uninformed, do relatively little research, and look at the price and ‘name’ first and last.
And historically, reliability has been a difficult USP to sell unless/until there is a really well documented and specific problem with something, and even then, it doesn’t seem to grab massive market share (steel frames with threaded bbs are still quite niche, and there are still lots of pressfit bb’s out there.) It also takes time to build a reputation for reliability, all the while trying to sell at a higher cost…
Okay, I can certainly see your point. I didn’t realise that pressfit bb’s were failing that much? But anyway trainers…
I just think that if a company committed to the research, and I can’t believe that there aren’t engineers at Tacx or Kickr who know exactly what is causing these failures and have a solution? Maybe trainers just can’t run that quietly and the attempts to make things quiet are where things are going wrong (I’m just making that up, I don’t know what the number 1 reason is).
So if a new trainer got marketed as never failing (even if it was a bit noisy) I think that would catch a lot of interest.
Admittedly it would have missed the captive market that Covid has created, and there must be plenty of trainers that haven’t failed (but I also imagine there are plenty of riders who have that horrible thought at the back of their mind every time they hear the slightest click) who wouldn’t be buying right at the moment. But if they start hearing about this unbreakable trainer then they would know where to go if/when their current trainer dies.
A bit like Wahoo got a lot of customers from people fed up with their Garmins crashing. This then gave Garmin a reason to improve their software, so they improved (at least from my perspective). Now things have stabilised and I haven’t heard of people’s Garmin’s dying recently.
(There would have to be a price point to this of course.)
But hey. That’s what I think. I’m not an engineer or company actually doing this, so what do I know. It just seems an obvious solution and an ‘easy’ get. It just seems to keep happening so I’m assuming that there is a market there.
I for one am waiting on a reliable smart trainer before I drop the cash. Nobody will get my money until something comes out that gets glowing reliability reviews for at least a year post-release. Which also means I don’t use Zwift (don’t see the point without sim mode), so there’s another company that won’t be getting my money. It’s definitely a problem in the industry and I’m sure we aren’t the only ones holding off.
The cynical view is that they know precisely what they are doing to maximize returns. It’s like that treadmill or spin bike that sits in the corner. We are a very small subset of that market that actually uses the product. A few complains will not hurt their bottom line or hamper their reputations as demonstrated by the many that glorify the customer service for servicing a substandard piece of … Image if that was you car! The apple model that made user sheeps and blame themselves for poor design needs to go.
I wish! If Apple made a smart trainer, design quirks aside that would absolutely be the one for me. The just works/reliability factor is exactly what I and others on this thread are looking for. Please trainer companies, follow the Apple model!
Alright, truce. Didn’t mean to derail the thread.
Putting on my mechanical engineer hat…I’ve been trying to figure this out from a product lifespan consideration. I think they try to consider how long someone would be interested in this type of a product vs. how long before they are ready to upgrade. Let’s face it, the customer base is fairly well off to be considering a $1k trainer in the first place. So my guess is that they have established something like you state ~3 year product cycle. The question is how much usage they anticipate.
But ultimately that consideration doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is whether or not they can be profitable vs. the cost to design, MARKET, and manufacture. Somewhere along the line in design or manufacturing, decisions were made that do not result in a reliable product. We will likely never know exactly why that is, but in terms of a manufacturing scale, these companies are probably not very experienced with the concepts of quality control tracking, incorporating customer feedback into product design, etc. Let’s be real, Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota still struggle with issues and they have 100+ years of manufacturing experience. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we should lower our expectations.
Who believe this will ever happen with anything!
If it was, it would be the death of the company. They must sell new things! Nothing must last too long. It must break!
The way they set cadence (via power pulses) works, but is possible to “fool” with our variation in power delivery, and particularly when we are extra smooth. Hard to beat a real sensor when you want the most accurate data.