1987 - The failure of AccuShift

SunTour realized that the market had shifted to indexed shifting. 1986 saw a crash program to develop indexed shifting for all of SunTour's gruppos. There was no time for the luxury of trickle down from Superbe to the less expensive lines. 1987 would be the catch-up year. All of the engineering and development was handled by about twenty people.

In 1987, SunTour introduced indexed shifting across the board with five road bike and four mountain bike gruppos. Eleven indexed rear derailleurs were combined with ten indexed shift levers, and nine freewheels with five, six, or seven sprockets and wide- or narrow-spacing.

The new 1987 rear derailleurs for road bikes were redesigned to include a spring-loaded top pivot. This was similar to Shimano's SIS design. SunTour called it Twin Tension. The mountain bike rear derailleurs did not pivot on the top. They had longer chain gaps and needed a chain that was "stiffer" laterally. Daido (DID) made all of SunTour's chains. Four different chains were needed for the different derailleurs and freewheels. You could not mix and match chains. Using Shimano's criteria, Accushift had a narrow Rideable Range of Adjustability.

The technical problems were fairly minor and could have been overcome with more time and testing. The critical failure was SunTour's inability to "police" the low-priced market. SunTour desperately needed orders so they could not require complete SunTour gruppos of Accushift-compatible components. They made strong recommendations, but major bike makers, including Schwinn and Raleigh, decided to use up their inventories of old French freewheels, hubs, cables, and casings. Worst of all, they used up the miles of cheap chain in their warehouses. These old components did not provide the critical tolerances needed for reliable indexed shifting.

As the prototypes were assembled and the first bikes were shipped, problems erupted. SunTour rushed engineers and service people from Japan to the factories and the bike shops to identify and correct the problems. Once in a "fire fighting" mode, the cost of doing business increased dramatically and this chewed up the profits needed to develop new products.

When the SunTour AccuShift-equipped bikes reached the customers, they would not index shift well, or they would work for a few weeks and then go out of adjustment. This led to unhappy bicycle buyers and unhappy bike shop mechanics. The "shop rats" in the bike stores quickly learned to prefer Shimano SIS and their complaints worked back up the line to the distributors and eventually to the people who were selecting the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) components for the 1988 bikes. . . For 1989, SunTour had four new AccuShift road gruppos: GPX, Olé, Edge, and Blaze. There were two new mid-priced mountain bike gruppos, XCE 4050 and XCM 3040, and four new low-priced mountain bike rear derailleurs. All of the important SunTour rear derailleurs now had two spring-loaded pivots to go with the horizontal slant parallelograms. In 1989, SunTour was almost as good as Shimano but the OEM buyers made their decisions based on 1987. SunTour never get a second chance. . . By 1990, SunTour and Shimano were close in performance and SunTour had some unique features. However, a "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" had set in. SunTour offered 12 road and 15 mountain derailleurs, but the people writing OEM specifications chose Shimano because they assumed that Shimano would sell better. There were fewer and fewer SunTour-equipped bikes. Sometimes the buyer would issue a "mercy" specification for one SunTour bike in the entire lineup. The bike shops and the buying public assumed that there was still something wrong with SunTour. Their market share slipped back to 25%. SunTour suffered another major loss and the Japanese banks would not make new loans.