Originally Posted by
veganbikes
That is a new one, having sold them for years I haven't yet had one come back for any issues or heard anything like that from other dealers. Luckily Specialized has a lifetime warranty on their frames so if nothing else they can replace it so long as you are the original owner so while yes they stopped doing the AWOL and Sequoia I can still replace it with something else potentially.
To Specialized's credit, they have done an admirable job of replacing frames. There was one person who had a cracked AWOL, who then had a cracked replacement Sequoia frame, which was replaced with a carbon Crux frame. Mostly people are having frames replaced with Diverge frames, though, but I think it depends on the local Specialized companies in various countries. If you join the Specialized AWOL and Sequoia Owners Group on Facebook you can see the carnage. Every time the admin would post a frame crack thread over there, some person would go away, check the chainstays of their bike and come back to the group to report another cracked frame.
One theory is that Specialized--or whichever Taiwanese OEM company was making the steel AWOL and Sequoia frames for Specialized--bought a bad batch of tubing for year model 2017 bikes and onward, or that they changed some step in the manufacturing process, because early production AWOLs don't crack with anything like the regularity of later AWOLS and Sequoias. They all crack in the same place--in the chainstays by the wheel clearance dimples and occasionally in the thin bit of steel above the derailleur hanger on AWOL frames--and it's just too regular for it to be coincidence.