My New Road Bike Has Electronic Shifting, And I Hate it!

When the solution is worse than the problem

The thing I love about American manufacturing companies is that they’re always innovating. Innovation is the engine of capitalism because it keeps us buying new versions of stuff. The new version has to have a feature so compelling that we feel compelled to upgrade. Any problem that users complain about has to be fixed with new technology. And if users run out of problems, the companies have to invent a problem so they can design a fix for it and call it a groundbreaking upgrade, even if not a single customer was asking for it.

In the case of bicycles, this nonexistent problem was gear shifting. Shifting is kind of important, particularly if you’re an out of shape weekend warrior and live in a hilly area like northern California. I need nice low gears to get up some of the steep hills, and being able to shift down quickly can mean I can keep peddling and not end up lying in a heap on the pavement.

The component that shifts the chain to the next set of cogs is called the “derailleur”. You control this with a little push button on the handlebar called the shifter, and traditionally the shifter and derailleur were connected by a thin metal cable. The process works great. In over 20 years of riding, I’ve never once broken a shifter cable. They need to be replaced every few years since cables can fray. But they worked, and it never occurred to me that the mere existence of this cable was a dire problem in need of technological intervention.

SRAM to the rescue

But it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m just an ignorant member of the bike riding proletariat. One of the companies that makes bicycle drivetrain components - SRAM (pronounced “shram” because they’re funny like that) decided that the shifter cable was a danger to the social fabric and needed to be obsoleted yesterday.

Their ingenious solution was to turn the shifter into a remote control like the one you use for the living room TV. Press it, and it sends a wireless signal to the derailleur telling it to shift up or down. By golly, it’s magic!

To make this happen, the bike now has four pieces of electronic wizardry to handle this communication, one for each shifter and one for each derailleur (front and rear). Each one needs a battery, and each one has its own firmware that needs to be upgraded when a new version comes out.

Image credit: it’s my own damn bike!

So to recap our discussion so far: in order to eliminate the suddenly life-threatening shifter cable, I need to run a battery-powered 4-node computer cluster on my bicycle!

Naturally, SRAM has an app to manage this cluster. (What else would you expect? Even my dishwasher has a fucking app.) While firmware upgrades can usually be postponed til whenever, you really need to make sure the batteries have enough charge. If a battery runs out of juice on the ride, you’re stuck in whatever gear you last shifted into. If it’s a high gear and you still have hills to climb, you’re in for some (cue Mr. T in Rocky 3) pain.

If you’re an absent-minded person like me (sorry, a person experiencing an absence of mind), going to the garage the night before a ride to check the batteries is an easy thing to forget. So the odds of me getting a dead battery is much higher than the odds of anything bad happening to a trusty old shifter cable. This is what engineers refer to as a “bad design tradeoff”.

If you are lucky enough to remember to whip out your phone the evening before and hold it next to your bike with the app open, you’ll see a screen like this.

The red icon means you have to replace the battery in the right shifter (which SRAM calls a “controller” because using language regular people understand would mean they’d have to fire their UX team). You already did that? Great. Since you’ve got the app open, let’s check your firmware too. If you’re out of date, it will prompt you to download and install the new bits.

At this point you might be wondering,”Do I really need to upgrade my bike’s firmware? It’s shifting fine. Is someone really going to hack into it and start playing with the gears just to mess with me?”

In most cases you probably have nothing to worry about. Unless you work for a terrorist group like Hezbollah. In that case, you’ll want to make sure you have the latest security patches. Otherwise the Israelis will absolutely make your derailleur explode and totally ruin your ride. Come to think of it, Mossad has probably already infiltrated SRAM’s supply chain, so you’re better off sticking to an old timey bike with a shifter cable. I’m starting to wish I had done that myself.