Bike Manufacturers Are Making Bikes Less Repairable

Founder of Gouach, the repairable (and fireproof!) e-bike battery mentioned in the article, happy to answer any question!

- we salvaged 100s of discarded e-bike batteries

- we found that 90% of components were like new

- batteries were thrown away because of the spot-welding and the glue which prevents repairability

- we spent 2 years (and 5 patents) to design a robust, safe, and easy to assemble system that requires nothing but a screwdriver

Our batteries have been in use since 2 years in the streets of France, on micro-mobility e-bikes, in the harshest possible conditions (rain, snow, cold, heat, shocks), and we're very happy with their performances!

We're now opening it to the general public (for conversion kits, and to replace old batteries that are no longer manufactured)

We plan to open-source at least part of the embedded software, so people can write extensions (to let their battery "talk" with any e-bike system, and share it — using WASM embeddable code — to other people on the web!)

Let's fight planned obsolescence!

(and if you're looking for a new battery, there's 25% off on https://get.gouach.com)

Work in a bike shop part-time. Can confirm: there are about two dozen bottom bracket tools in the drawer. In fairness, bottom brackets have been a pain in the ass for decades. Even on old ones, there are a couple different hook spanners and pin spanners you might need for the lock ring and adjustable cup and a couple other weird-ass wrenches that you need from time to time. Shit's usually tight AF too, and the various tools that were fine for manufacturing a bike get a little iffy when everything's good and seized after 20 years of neglect.

As for e-bikes, my usual observation when one comes in with an intermittent error is "We've managed to make bicycles as reliable as computers. What an incredible accomplishment for our species."

We only work on the electric drivetrain on Trek bikes (and others that use Bosch). I can vouch for the fact that as of October 2024, the electric drivetrain stuff can be handled from the on-bike computer and an app isn't necessary for basic functionality. I'm sure you get some more features with the app, but you don't need it to just go for a ride.

Batteries come with some wrinkles. Many manufacturers (not just Trek) want to make them easily removable so you can take them with you to charge and prevent them from getting stolen. They also want them to integrate nicely with the frame visually. The result is frequently some amount of compromise in the proprietary direction.

That said, Bosch appears to make some standard-ish batteries that are used in less-integrated installations across bike manufacturers.

How to make your life super easy if shopping for a bike:

- 1 1/8 steerer tube, or maybe tapered

- Threadless a-head headset in any common SHIS type. Threaded ones won’t last as long.

- QR or common thru-axle

- Any common BB standard (threadless ones are actually fine but require a well made frame, and you’d be surprised how many expensive frames are not well made)

- Always a round seat post and get 27.2mm if you can. Bigger if you care about dropper posts

- Rim brakes are fine unless you are doing serious off road. If going disc, hydraulics offer great performance for the price.

- Flat bar shifting components are much more interchangeable and better value that drop bar!

- If going drop bar, consider older 2x11 speed mechanical equipment. It’s much cheaper and it was competitive at a pro level not so long ago.

- External cable routing!

- Aluminium is uncool, but it represents a sweet spot in terms of weigh/cost/durability

- Tyre volume, not frame material, is the most important factor in comfort

- Never buy a bike that doesn’t fit you

These tips won’t get you the best bike (in terms of absolute performance) but it will be reliable, easy to fix and good value.

I wish they'd have given more examples for traditional bikes than bottom brackets. Yeah, bike shops have to deal with lots of different BBs, but that's because they deal with bikes that might be 30 or 40 years old, from all over the planet. Some threaded, some press-fit, etc. Some high-end, some very cheap.

On the most part, bike manufacturers use standardized parts that can be replaced by and end-user with sufficient know-how and the tools to do it. There aren't that many companies making drivetrain parts, so you tend to see Shimano and SRAM just about everywhere, and maybe the odd Campagnolo-equipped bike every now and then. At least here in the US. (Unrelated, Shimano's product range is crazy - somehow their components come stock on bikes ranging from $250 up to $12k or more.)

Outside of < $200 Wal-Mart bikes, I've never had any trouble repairing or finding someone to do "normal" repairs or maintenance on a bicycle. I'd like to know what prompted the article, unless the real point was to complain about E-Bike batteries, which is not something I can really comment on.

I'm grateful that my 2019 Norco Section uses a round seatpost, threaded Shimano BB, and standard cockpit; I deplore the "self-adjusting" D-shaped Giant seatpost on my girlfriend's bike (which is subtly off-centre and takes all kinds of witchery to approximate the ease with which I can adjust a standard seatpost), as well as the mess of BBs and integrated cockpits that are becoming common even on mid-range road & gravel bikes. When I buy my next bike, I will go out of my way to select something using standardized parts. I very much hope something akin to the Framework laptop comes to market in cycling, where the entire machine is built to be user-serviceable with off-the-shelf, readily available parts. I put something like 20,000 km commuting to school on my early 1970s Raleigh Record, which I rebuilt almost completely with my brother, and it was a gloriously simple machine that I miss dearly today.

Speaking as an ex bicycle repair man, this irks and/or boggles me. I feel trolled. I mean, I doubt the veracity of this headline and I think they're making shit up.

Bicycles are beautifully fixable and tweakable. Back at the shop we had hundreds of old bikes and half-bikes and hills of parts. Our power was vast and we were a wellspring of goodness. Our reputation was international. My boss was a master spoked wheel tuner.

I can smell it now.

Unfortunately this isn't a new problem. My 20+ year old bike, that doesn't have a single electronic component on it, has a single special crankarm bolt because the crankarm is "integrated" with the spider, presumably to shave off a few grams. Four normal bolts and one special bolt that may be hard to find today.

A lot of bikes are often designed for racing, the equivalent of exotic cars. So new standards that have very marginal benefits are routinely being created and then abandoned when it gets rejected by the market or there is a new, better standard. But things that are mundane and standard today were cutting-edge when they first came out, and likely emerged from several competing standards.

Bicycles should be required to be sold with a sheet of all the measurements of replacement parts. I find that buying the correct part is often the biggest hurdle in maintaining my bicycles.

My daily cycling mostly consists of a mile and a half to the station each way without any serious hills, but my station bike is one we got second-hand for my brother when he was a teenager back in 1980 or so and we repainted it back then, so it's probably over 50 years old. It is the scruffiest bike in the bike shed at the station, which is just the way I want it. But most importantly, just about everything on it still works. It was once a racer with a lightweight steel frame, but I put straight bars on it 20 years ago. It lives outside year round and has done so for 25 years, so it has a nice patina that means thieves always look the other way. A little rust converter every now and then ensures the corrosion looks much worse than it really is. The original pedals finally fell apart a couple of years ago, but replacements were readily available. The front derailier failed and I removed it, so it's a 5-speed now, but that is fine for my use. The saddle has been replaced many times. And the rear wheel needed replacing twice. But it's still on the original chainwheel (!), brakes, rear derailier, shifter and remarkably, front wheel. Headstock bearings and bottom bracket are original too. Anytime I have needed something, the local independent bike shop has it - all the parts are still available.

Alongside it at the station are so many nice looking bikes, but chances are mine will outlive all of them and not get stolen either. Anyway, if you're getting a bike as transport, get yourself something used from way back that was a high quality bike back then. Some of them at least were built to last, they're easy to repair, and are still way lighter than most modern bike shaped objects.

The science/education podcast Let's Learn Everything had an episode recently about planned obsolescence [1], and it does seem to have started with the bicycle. So this is not new.

1: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/lets-learn-everything/70-the...

Can't get past the intro sentence without getting triggered. No, most people cannot fix a bike. As evidenced by the horrid shape most bikes are in. Heaven help folks that get the brakes so that they need to replace pads. You are as often to see people that ruined rims as you are to see people that did that correctly.

Don't get me wrong, there is something there. Everyone can be trained to fix older mechanical things. This is true. And I, for the life of me, cannot understand why people get bikes that need apps to run. That is just baffling.

So, change this to "ebikes are not being designed with repairability in mind" and I think I lose near all of my complaint. I do have worries about people not realizing how powerful ebikes are. Reminds me of early dirt motorcycles you could work on back in the day. Didn't take too many kids getting hurt before people took those seriously, I don't think. Odd to see us go right back down that path all because a lot of parents assume the battery tech is the same as it was a decade or so ago.

Meh. There have been Bike Shaped Objects sold at non-bike shops forever. Huffy used to be a complete joke of a bike, but in 1988 the 7-11 team rode "Huffy" frames. (which were really Serottas).

Yeah, there are a lot of bottom bracket standards, most of them aren't proprietary, they're just different. Bottom brackets are a lot better than they were 40 years ago too -- back then you could pull them apart, replace the balls, repack the grease, and change the cups and spindle. And you had to. Now, you get a cartridge BB or a minimal pair of cups and some standard bearings. My sealed bearings now last a lot better than my cup and cone ones did.

Hubs are similar. Cup and cone bearings can be maintained, but they pit, and no one ever really had replacable races. So if your bearings were bad, you replaced the wheel. With better hubs, you just pop out the bearings and pop new ones in.

Old school (7-8sp) Shimano jockey wheels _never_ spun freely. Sram 11 speed ones, even on apex, spin beautifully, and in the case of my gravel bike, are outlasting the derailleur.

I think we're in kind of a new golden age of cycling. There are tons of interesting bikes being made by small providers, using 3d printing, old school steel fabrication, custom carbon. There are tons of small company parts -- most CNC, but some additive. Basic non BSO components are pretty reliable, and even Shimano's low end isn't that bad for the casual crowd. There's a niche for everything, tracklocross or basket bikes or cargo or gravel or mountain touring or full squish. And there are even road bikes too.

iFixit has some good rants, but this isn't one of them.

Lithium ion batteries and battery modules are never ever gonna be user repairable. The main reason is that the electrolyte is a highly toxic, carcinogenic and extremely flammable organic solvent. AAs are user swappable because the electrolyte is water based.

Bikes started being less repairable when manufacturers noticed that steel frame 10 speeds were lasting multiple decades. If parts continue to be available, those frames are still going to be in use another 50 years from now. Particularly where cartridge bearings are used.

Carbon fiber bikes are part of the trend. Will we eventually see a straight up plastic adult bike frame?

There are many kinds of bottom bracket these days, but like, not that many. BSA is still extremely common and it's looking like T47 (which has two variants) will be the other common standard going forward. BB30, BB86 exist. Other variants are much less common.

Essentially the entire rest of the article is about ebikes and proprietary batteries, motors, apps, etc, and yeah, that's all true. I'd probably have just killed the bottom bracket section of this article and had the headline mention ebikes rather than try to generalize.

I hate how fetishists on certain narrow cross cutting topics (e.g. right to repair, open source, environmentalists, security) drag the conversation in such a negative direction. The biggest revolution in biking accessibility happened in the last 10 years with electrification of bicycles. Most people care about total cost of ownership. The old bicycle were 100% repairable by most people and while it's a loss to not to be able to do that anymore it won't impact many people other than the ones looking to either drop their costs to near zero or the fetishists who will scream their heads off the whole time.

It reminds me of not being able to pick a milk without getting scorn from somewhere (real milk ~ cows, oat milk ~ sugar, macadamia milk ~ env impact, soy milk ~ hormones, etc). All the while we're watering alfalfa to feed cows for beef.

Oh boy the bikes are less repairable, even though half the city dwellers could be replacing cars with electric bikes. A car has way higher repair bills and up front purchase costs not to mention the ongoing costs.

I think that's true for e-bikes, but that's perhaps to be expected in a newer market.

Over in analog mountain bikes, we have the new UDH standard, and basically everything else was standardized except some bearings. All mountain bikes are pretty modular. The main manufacturers make the frame, and then bolt on parts from different brake, shock, etc suppliers. There's at least two of each, which keeps things competitive.

Hmm, I don’t know anything about ebikes but normal bikes seem to be going back to BSA threaded bottom brackets.

The last 3 bikes I’ve bought have had BSA.

"This makes it all the more important that we have legislation to force them to make proprietary parts available for riders to buy themselves"

Of course this should be the case, but even then I'm not sure it would help, as they will simply make the spare parts so costly that it's uneconomical.

Maybe there should be a 'standardization' score, somewhat like energy efficiency scores, that could then be mandated.

Or mandate that parts interfaces must be documented and published as standards, and be free and open for competitors.

The basic problem is that almost the whole of business has discovered or decided that their reason for existence is to get money out of people, and that providing the best products and services they can is merely incidental and not actually necessary, especially if they all play the same game.

I have no respect for e-bikes and couldn't care less about how they're constructed, but I ride mountain bikes and a return to standardisation is a big theme of the newer generation of MTB. People are shunning brands that ship proprietary crap in favour of universal parts and sizes.

Im going to disagree - bikes are incredibly more repairable because of e-commerce. I no longer rely on local availability of parts, and lack of documentation when doing repairs. YouTube has infinite knowledge and Amazon/walmart ship literally any part to my door. Bottom bracket as an example I don’t think is fair - I’m an avid cyclist and have never once heard of anyone working in their bottom bracket. Chain, derailleur, cranks/pedals, brakes, handlebars, seat, etc are all very reasonable to do but bottom brackets everyone takes to a shop.

Additionally, shop prices (at least in Denver) are absolutely disgusting. A brake pad is $15 in my lbs, but the same one is $6 online direct from the mfg. maybe 2 minutes of labor to repair, but the shop will charge $75 minimum. I was quoted $130 for a chain replacement when I went in to get my recalled cranks replaced.

Unregulated markets trend towards brand lock-ins, proprietary parts, cheaper goods of inferior quality, etc. etc. etc. All businesses are doing this everywhere because we are running out of World for them to expand into, but any company that posts a less profitable quarter is presumed to be failing.

For centuries companies have chased the fantasy of infinite growth, and we're running out of room. If we don't start contending with this in a serious way, and applying changes to our society to accommodate it, we will only ever see more of this.

This mostly seems to be a complaint about e-bikes and batteries. Almost all major manufacturers are still making mostly user-repairable bikes for recreational riding and commuting.

From nearly a decade of bike industry experience, I can say that most people should not be doing their own repairs, or should at least have someone check their work. Lack of experience, shoddy mechanical aptitude, and poor attention to detail can all add up quickly to missing teeth and broken bones, or worse.

Opinionated solution; always buy used never buy electric. There are enough steel frames in the world that we probably never need to manufacture another one.

ever think the government should (externally) tax non-repairable stuff?

Sort of like gas-guzzler taxes?

Bikes have sucked for a long time and they just seem to be getting worse. Even a bike that costs $5k+ will inevitably fall apart. I find that if you are a real serious cyclist the best option is to buy your own frame and then build your own rig with bespoke parts.