Safest bike manufactures?

Just to be clear, I was not trying to dismiss their opinions because they “gain to profit” or some such. Their opinions are entirely valid, and apart from Hambini’s childish antiques and (to my ears unnecessarily) colorful language, I think they are completely correct in criticizing the bike industry. I think we (= the customer) should argue for better quality products, and IMHO it is not acceptable if my BB chews ball bearings for breakfast. (Which in my case it seems to do.)

I was more thinking about the analogy to a firefighter seeing fire all the time. And my second point was more of a quantitative one: Hambini gets the worst cases on his workbench. While what he shows in his videos seems egregious, we do not know the actual statistics here. It’s more an argument of nuance, I’m not denying they have a point. :slight_smile:

From my understanding they only CT scan forks. But they scan every fork.

turns out there are Institutions/magazines that do independent testing… obviously you gonna have to pay for their publications to see test results :man_shrugging:t2:

(one example I found: Home - Zedler Group - Zedler Gruppe )

EDIT: They also mention that current safety standards for bikes (ISO 4210) is basically just the bare minimum of safety and leaves a bit to be desired. So to answer OP question… I think the safest bike manufacturers are those who mention testing beyond this ISO standard (ideally done by a 3rd party) and don’t just have the usual ‘15% stiffer 8% more aero’ in their brochures.

Healthy skepticism ≠ cynicism.
I know enough physics to understand how problematic claims of e. g. this frame saves x watts at 40 km/h is. Unfortunately, there is so little money in journalism that I do not even know of a single publication knowledgable enough to verify (or falsify) these claims. But even if many of the quantitative claims are, let’s say, best-case-in-controlled-environment-type of numbers, you can still filter out useful bits of information out of that stream of marketing non-sense. For example, you can see the trend towards more aero elements even in normal bikes. You can see trends in geometry. Many bikes accept wider tires. Bike companies make efforts to make bikes more comfortable, etc. Can you feel the difference between two successive generations? Probably not? But if these developments accumulate, I am sure you can.

I watched his video on the Emonda SL (which is what i have) and was pleased with the quality of the workmanship inside. That said I’m not sure if excess glue or small voids really mean anything from a performance or durability standpoint, but combined with TREK’s Lifetime warranty which I have on both of my carbon bikes that I got from them new, it gives me a lot of peace of mind that if something fails in a decade, I’ll be made whole. That kind of warranty also tells me that they put good effort into making good bikes because I’m sure they want to honor that warranty as little as possible, and the best way to do that is to make quality bikes that won’t break in the first place, or at least make the best attempts to do so

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Then why do they all feel the urge to shove a complete unverifiable nonsense down our throats ? This is my biggest issue with the all these industries.

Why treat your potential customers as 2yo children ?

Because most people are dumb and it works on them.

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I suppose. Otherwise, companies like Ceramicspeed would cease to exist a long time ago.

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You are right, I did not suggest Hambini said anyone made unsafe products.

I was pointing out that although this thread is about ‘safest’ that safety should be a given and I am equally concerned about the quality of manufacturer, and so should the OP be. Point is you could be a really safe bike that ate bearings and had a penchant for turning left. Likewise you could have a really unsafe bike that was built bang on spec and true as a die.

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That’s how marketing works and I don’t like it either. I’m merely thinking that the bike industry isn’t particularly egregious. In fact, I think bikes are getting better. For example, I rented a Pivot mountain bike last fall (a trail bike), and this put my now close to 8-year-old XC fully to shame. It felt amazing to ride, was lighter, felt more efficient and had a dropper post. I didn’t have any numbers, but I experienced what a few years of evolution have arrived at. I wish other industries were as innovative to be honest.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should eat up marketing blurbs. It’s just that I can think of way worse industries.

I completely agree. For the price of a high-end bike, you can buy a small car. Needless to say, I know which of the two is mechanically more complicated. And if we are paying premium €€€€/¥¥¥¥¥¥/$$$$, I think customers should feel entitled to products of the highest quality — which includes tight tolerances.

And it is good that knowledgable people keep on pointing this out. Like you correctly said, my response was more with regards to actual safety (which, needless to say, we should expect even of cheap bikes).

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That’s a good comparison actually!

(source Specialized) A high end bike is ~500 pieces of carbon (frame and fork), resin, plus labour, plus seatpost and bearings. I have seen numbers to suggest each ‘high end’ frame takes ~24 man hours to make, including cutting materials, moulding, prep & paint. The tooling isn’t cheap (moulds) but is limited.

(source Toyota) A medium size car is ~30,000 parts, most of which are soured through third parties but obviously is a far wider range of tooling some of which are hideously expensive. Even the machining of an engine is far more than on a whole bike let alone the remaining car parts. Overheads like you wouldn’t believe, far more space and far greater logistics.

When put like that it’s surprising you can buy a car for so little!

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doesn’t Factor bikes do the same as well? Where they manufacturer their own bikes/components in their factory?

I believe so

Definitely true. If it wasn’t for economy of scale a car would cost millions.

I’ve read an article on bikebiz earlier with a couple of details about Canyon’s CT scans. I work in that area (sadly not for a bike manufacturer), so it was of interest. Assuming the article is correct - Canyon don’t actually ‘scan’ every part. They take 5 radiographs from different angles, that is not really enough to reconstruct the 3D structure (what you’d think of as a CT scan), but of course much quicker (a few minutes) and probably enough for their purposes, given the resolution restriction.

They said the resolution is about 1 mm, which sounds realistic because of the size of the parts, but it really is not enough to show up any defects in the composite itself (things like delamination or fibre cracks). They will be able to see if there is any material left inside the frames or if there are any major problems, for example composite patches that moved before consolidation or larger (mm) pores and cracks.

It also said that their factories in asia have their own scanners and do some of the testing there.

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Thanks for the insight. So it sounds like they’re looking for things that would cause catastrophic failures more than anything else.

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I think they are more looking for parts where something has really gone wrong in manufacturing, irrespective of the safety aspect.

They likely do other tests for structural integrity too.

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I know of three carbon frames breaking. Two were in crashes, one involved leaving the road and colliding with a large boulder the other the rider went sideways between two trees and the bike caught both trees and “folded” :open_mouth: That leaves the one. Female rider out on a club ride with one of the local clubs a few years ago, frame snapped and she went head first into the road. Fortunately for her an off-duty paramedic happened to be walking on the other side of the road when she crashed so she got quality first aid within seconds. I don’t know the make of the frame or of any subsequent report.

that’s nightmare material right there :scream: