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Comment by roland35 | Hacker News Reader

Peloton does have a lot going for it. From everyone I've heard, their physical products are well made (with the exception of the treadmill issue..). They have extremely low churn which is hard to do in fitness.

The main problem is that they grew too fast. All the pandemic sales were probably just pulled forward from future sales, not a sign of sustainable growth. They overcommitted and now need to trim back again.

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Agreed, apart from the fact that their treadmill kills kids, their products are exemplary.

Exemplary? Have you even tried other stationary bikes? You can get a BETTER stationary bike for less than the cost of a Peloton bike.

I thought above poster was sarcastic.

Do you have any recommendations?

Preferably one I don't HAVE to pay a subscription to use...

The fact you called it a stationary bike is kind of telling.

There's two kinds of people:

People who actually know what equivalents to Peloton hardware cost

... and people who think the hardware is overpriced

Powered slatted treadmills started at around $15,000 when the original Tread launched at $4,000

Spin bikes can be $200... they can also be well over $2000, and the Peloton has more in with the over $2,000 models than the $200 Alibaba special.

Heck, you can get a decent enough actual bike that you can actually ride places and a Wahoo Kickr for less.

The treadmill incidents were absolutely terrible but without knowing Peloton's internal design process I don't want to assign blame. Any physical product with powerful motors and moving parts is inherently dangerous, and the best we can do as hardware engineers is to follow the standards as best we can and do a thorough hazard analysis and try to mitigate as much as possible.

Now, if it turns out Peloton did NOT do those things, then they absolutely deserve more blame for the accidents with their treadmills. I know they didn't have a shield behind the belt, but my treadmill doesn't have that either so I am not sure what the standard is without paying for it.

I think it was one kid. Mike Tyson's daughter was killed by a treadmill many years ago. I was kind of surprised that based on the CPSC's numbers, treadmills kill 8.5 people a year on avg.

That's part of the criticism. The investor group was upset that the CEO built up way too much production infrastructure for what should have been viewed as a temporary bump in demand. Peloton is very vertically integrated committed to a ton of capacity they don't need.

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