Originally Posted by
lisitsa
Maybe pedals are a hard thing to make reliable? In essence you are putting all your weight on the pedals very small ball bearings.
It's easy to make pedals reliable. It's done all the time. But, read some of the above posts as to why manufacturers put super cheap, shoddy pedals on new bikes. They don't expect you to keep them and they don't know which brand and type of good pedals you will wind up using.