Originally Posted by
maartendc
What a load of rubbish. Oh, its on the internet, so it must be true!
Sure, you should use common sense and get your bike checked out after a crash. As you should with any bicycle. However, to just scare people away from carbon fiber is just stupid.
Tens of thousands of people buy and ride carbon fiber bicycles each year, and carbon fiber bikes have been around for at least two decades now. I have yet to see a large number of people getting injured or killed from riding carbon fiber bicycles or parts.
You should be more concerned about getting hit by a car, that is how cyclists really get injured and killed, no matter the material their bike is made of.
https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/oth...ries-1.1879653
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In terms of technology three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond was a pioneer. When steel dominated, LeMond rode bikes made of carbon-fibre composites, then an exotic material mostly used by the military.
At this year’s Tour, carbon fibre is the only material used for bikes and it has also replaced aluminium in wheel rims. Strength, weight and design flexibility has ensured the material’s dominance. And its most extreme form, the time-trial bicycle, was on display in Saturday’s 20th stage.
But there’s a catch: unlike steel or aluminium, carbon fibre does not bend in crashes. The bikes and wheels frequently shatter, often hurling riders to the road and, many fear, increasing severity of injuries.
“Anyone in a team who’s being honest with you will tell you how frequently their bikes are breaking; everybody knows,” said Mark Greve, a physician and assistant professor of sports medicine at Brown University who studied injuries to 3,500 competitive cyclists. “Few people in the public appreciate how many bikes a pro team will go through in a season, because they break
.”
Having conquered professionals, who ride frames that retail in the United States for $5,000 (€3,700) to $6,000 with forks, carbon fibre is making its way to increasingly affordable models available to the more casual riders.
A code of silence exists among riders, even retired ones, and mechanics and team officials over the carbon bike and wheel durability. The teams and riders exist, in part, to act as powerful marketing tools for bicycle makers. But when they spoke on the condition they not be identified, their stories emerged. Riders described landing on the top, horizontal tube of the bikes during crashes and ending up on the road after frames collapsed. Even small spills often require a bike change. Mechanics say they sometimes return the shattered remains of frames to manufacturers in bags intended to hold a single bicycle wheel."
When lawyers are lining up you can bet that there's something under those circling vultures:
https://www.atlantainjurylawyer.com/...-injury-o.html
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation published a report that noted pedal-cyclist fatalities had increased by 12 percent year-on-year. Now there could be many reasons for this but bicycle recalls are routinely announced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The safety agency has recalled millions of bicycles due to cracking frames, breaking forks, faulty chains, failing brakes.
https://theracery.com/blogs/news/is-this-carbon-safe
We are continually told that aluminum and steel are no more safe than carbon fiber. And yet we didn't have people crying about sudden catastrophic failures of steel or aluminum.
It must also be said that you obviously do not appreciate the changes in carbon fiber bikes over the last five years. They have gone from "we don't trust this material so we will overbuild it" to "who cares - racers want the lightest possible". The end result is several people bragging about having bikes with all up weights of 12 lbs.
You can absolutely rely on people who have paid $6,000 for a bike to defend it to the death. And let's hope it doesn't come to that.