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Comment by talove | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, the electronic drivetrains are superior in just about every performance metric, aside from needing to be charged every few weeks. You might not want an tablet computer in your refrigerator door but electronic bike shifting is more akin to going from carbureted to fuel injected engines, it is the more reliable and tunable of the two options.

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Long time cat3 here.

This simply isn’t true, across the board they are heavier. Satellite shifter are wonderful, but that’s not a performance metric. Also, fwiw, races have been lost due to shifting power being out and being stuck in a gear. Rigo Uran stands out, a few years back at the Tour.

I’m not a hater, I have some electronic shifting in my stable.

Editing, I was misremembering my gruppo weights, they are on parity.

> Also, fwiw, races have been lost due to shifting power being out

In addition to a mechanical now one might have an electronical. I hate tuning my mech shifters, but Di2 cable routing inside the frame, seatpost batteries? No thanx. I hope it has improved since the seatpost battery days.

Also that problem a few years back in the Tour was when the tech was new, wasn't it? Don't hear as much about that as much anymore. Flat tires are still far more common.

Has no one snapped a mech shifter cable in a race? (I don’t follow the professional racing.)

Granted, maybe I'm better at keeping up w/ my cables than most people, but it's not like my mechanically shifted bikes are ever bad at shifting....and "charged every few weeks" is a big "aside"...unless they make a battery that can be charged in about the same time it takes to pump up my tires, it's an extra cognitive load to keep track of the charge vs. just hopping on the bike and riding.

What's not reliable and tunable when using classic, cable operated gear shifting? I'm all ears, since my offroad bikes are usually getting thrown around a lot, are usually dirty and covered in mud... and gear shifting just works, no need to charge anything and require some adjustments once per year...

I understand that some people get excited about just any $shinynewtoy but unless you're in a position to take measurable performance gain out of it... it's really just a $shinynewtoy. There's a lot more performance to be gained with improving the rider, losing weight, etc.

Or maybe just stop being obsessed by specs, performance, results, comparing oneself to others and just start to enjoy riding.

If you're only adjusting your cable-pull drivetrains annually, you're getting off easy!

Once you ride electronic shifting, it's hard to go back. It's really nice, really stable, and on the whole I've had much fewer issues with eTap than I had with mechanical Ultegra.

> on the whole I've had much fewer issues with eTap than I had with mechanical Ultegra.

Which might say more about Ultegra than the overall question of cable-driven vs. electronic shifting.

It absolutely does.

It says that cable-pull systems require more (and more intense) maintenance than electronic systems do.

I dunno. Maybe this is true for off-road bikes, but I have basically never done any maintainance on my (numerous) cable-pull systems after they get through the cable stretch phase.

All of mine are road.

My old 9-speed bike is rock solid, but I ride it rarely (utility purposes, basically).

My 11-speed mechanical bike needed adjustment probably 3-4 times a year (and on one of those occasions it'd be time to swap out the cables). Until I upgraded the shifters would eventually "eat" cables (well, on the right side anyway) and strand me in the lowest cog (Ultegra 6800), which was a huge hassle.

My 11-speed eTap bike asks only that I charge the batteries periodically. In the 2 years I've had eTap on that bike, I've spent MUCH less time futzing with the drivetrain than I did when it was mechanical Red, or than I did when I rode the Ultegra bike full time.

Electronic shifting never has to be tuned, that’s the point. It tunes itself so you always have clean shifting, no grinding chains.

Have you ever ridden a properly built bike with a campagnolo group set? I've gone 15+ years on both my carbon tri bike and custom Ti road bike (both with Campagnolo Record) without ever tuning it (past the first 50-70 miles, thanks cable stretch).

Yes I have.

I have a couple of Campag equipped bikes and that’s not my experience.

Mechanical Campag is not as reliable as Di2 or Campag EPS IMHO.

There’s not a huge amount of tuning required but it is definitely still needed and you still need to replace the cable outers as they ware.

They don’t stretch by the way, that’s a myth. The force required to stretch a woven cable is massive. It’s just ferrels shifting on the cut ends of the outers.

Sure, but now you're talking about a group set that's more expensive than most electronic shifting sets. I had 15 year old bikes that were great, but I don't have the irrational hatred for electronic groupsets that most of the commenters here seem to have.

I don't hate electronic shifting. I don't like the innacurate disparagment of an older, simpler, generally more reliable technology, even if it is possible to name some benefits to the new stuff.

Is it really that hard to believe that mechanical shifters are less reliable than electronic ones? I've lost count of the number of cables my shifters have eaten over the years. We're talking about a clockwork-like ratchet handling a cable under many pounds of tension going through many twists and turns, moving hundreds of times per ride, and very hard to access for maintenance. To me it's pretty clear that regardless of Shimano's mistakes, electronic shifting is the way forward.

I've never had a shifting cable break on me (despite being an ultra-marathon and touring cyclist for 20-30 years, bike commuter for 15+ years, and more). I don't know what you mean by "very hard to access for maintenance" - the most maintenance I ever do is maybe add a few drops of lube inside any able housing once every few years. The cable and ratchet do not really interact with each other.

Electronic shifting involves non-user-repairable and definitely not-on-the-road maintenance, which for me personally is a negative (even though it is true that I would likely not be able to repair a cable issue on the road.

Ultegra and Dura Ace DI2 is expensive. Vs. the cost of Campagnolo Veloce/Athena/Potenza or even Chorus. And ironically, you could get Campy easier during the pandemic than anything Shimano....

I'd love to understanding how this auto-tuning works. Could you ELI5 or share some resources? Thanks.

There are different versions out there so I don't know if my statement is globally accurate but I would not call it auto-tuning. But for me the tuning process is magical compared to mech gearing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBIXq82M_oU

TLDR: You shift to the 5th ring, put it in adjustment mode, now each click is a microadjustment something like 1/10 or 1/12. You adjust until the chain begins to rub, then back it out I think 5 clicks and you are done. That single adjustment means you can shift across all gears.

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