Originally Posted by
StephenH
With a car, they slap a transmission in it at the factory, and you go drive 100,000 miles with it. They put brakes in at the factory, you replace pads every 50,000 or however many miles.
With a bicycle, brakes and transmission seem to require constant maintenance, lubrication, adjustment, etc.
So my opinion, stuff works fine as it is, but the biggest improvement would be getting stuff where it just doesn't need to be adjusted or maintained to work right.
Coaster brakes and geared hubs were kind of a step in that direction, but they have their own issues.
With the cars, weight is often ignored, and manufactures have been struggling with bloating cars as they have added thousands of pounds of weight, then are trying to maintain decent fuel efficiency. My old Fiat 500 tipped the scales at about 1000 pounds. The new ones are quite light at about 2,500 pounds.
In the bike world, weight is a premium as more people target 20 pound bikes. Manufactures get beat up when they build 50 pounds bikes.
Schwinn might be a company that mass produced moderate quality bikes, innovative in some things, but they ignored weight and I believe that contributed to their bankruptcy.
I do think part of the MTB boom was as a response to the flimsy racing bikes (although most of the public never had true racing bikes anyway). But a lot of people dislike things like flat tires and the need to always have a pump and tubes with the bike.
Nobody wants a bike that rides like a Harley with pedals.
Several companies have experimented with sealed cartridge bearings, but at least in hubs they have never been widely accepted in the bike world. Even so, the seals for traditional bearings have been improving over the years.