Originally Posted by
twocicle
Sorry, I just don't understand Shimano's mindset on why they would offer a XTR Di2 triple and not offer a triple in any other level for Mtn and none for any Road Di2 whatsoever. They just released the XT Di2 and no triple. This is really irking me.
Shimano has proven the XTR Di2 triple works fine, so it seems there is no good excuse not to offer it as a Road triple too. My reasoning for this statement is that these days there are very few Mtn bikes, if any, offering a triple setup. Walk into any modern, non-dept store bike shop that sells decent stuff and you will find the vast majority of those Mtn bikes are 1x rings only. By "vast majority", I'm seeing like 90%, with very few multi-rings on the floors.
Looking at the Road bike market, not only do you have the pavement bikes, but also gravel grinders and the trekking people too. IMO the market for a Road triple is far larger than whatever might still exist in the Mtn format.
I agree entirely. I can see how killing the front derailleur has merit. A front derailleur has always been & will always be a crude device. I has to shift the tension side of the chain and no one has come up with an elegant way to do this. However, it is about the only way to get a wide gear range. New mountain bike rear cassettes can deliver a 4:1 range (10x40 cassette) and I have heard that a 10x50 can be found. However, I'm not sure that a rear derailleur shifting this wide a range would be a better solution than a more modest rear range in combination with multiple rings.
On our old mechanically shifted bike, we had more than a 5:1 range (54x44x30 front) with 11x32 rear with no big jumps. Trying to achieve that with 2 rings up front is pretty difficult whenever I want to shift the front.
The vast majority of Shimano's market is single bikes so they think they can deliver an acceptable range without a front derailleur.
However, if one accepts the compromise of a front derailleur, whether it is 2x or 3x would seem to affect the performance (and cost) very little.