Originally Posted by
EvilV
Not wanting to insult REAL strida riders at all, or Mr Saunders, but let's not forget when we are going on about quality that some of the early stridas were far from durable according to easily found accounts on the web. My father bought one of the very first ones and it was awful. He returned it within days. They had all kinds of plastic parts and some of these were only recently superseded with the Strida 5. (BB shell for example). Now I realise that it takes a massive amount of skill to develop a thing like this bike and that I don't have what it takes in the least - hat off to the inventor and his partners, but to look at some of the comments on the other S forum, you'd really think the knockoff was a monstrous sacrilege, and an insult to a perfect device.
Now that you mention it, I do remember reading about the early Strida's quality issues on the net. The newer models are surely a big improvement over those first generation iterations. However, looking at the basic design of the Strida, and it's knockoffs, I believe that these bikes are not meant for heavy use. They seem too delicate, and I am more than certain that even an authentic 5.0, wouldn't hold up month after month on the type of streets I commute on.
All that said, both the original, and the imitation versions are ingenious devices to say the least
Regards,
Edward