Originally Posted by
mulleady
Anyone who buys them is supporting intellectual property theft and cheating. I'm surprised you would even contemplate buying one. If you think the Strida 5 is overpriced then don't buy one at all. They hardly had the originality that Mark Sanders has to come up with such a concept. I'm sure the parts are inferior too in this case since they are prepared to rip off somebody elses concept.
I thought China had joined the WTO now and would crack down on companies like these. Some hope!
LOL - ya know that's a bit prim there mulleady. It's called globalisation. The Chinese can produce things at a fraction of our western costs. Granted they can do it VERY badly, but they can also do it VERY WELL too. This bike might be crap, or it might be excellent. It depends on the motives of the manufacturer. I read the same kinds of nonsense (poor quality, nasty constrcution etc) about the Merc. It has been one of the most pleasure giving posessions I ever had and the AtoB review that almost stopped me buying it is a filthy pack of lies, propagated by an irked Brompton hanger on.
All this holier than though stuff about rip-offs, seems to miss the point that even in the case of very innovative bikes, we are talking about minor re-designs of a hundred year old technology. You make a frame that holds two wheels apart and you drive one of them by cranks and pedals.
There is virtually nothing about any modern bicycle that wasn't thought up by 1910, except maybe the use of fancy new materials like carbon fibre. The bike is a very basic mechanical device and we should stop thinking and talking about them like the idea of them had just been brought to us by Martians. Every bike manufacturer relies on a hundred years of mechanical ideas and already proven technologies. What about the strida has not been done before?
The bike below has more than a passing similarity to the Strida, don't you think? New - I don't think so.
