MinnMan

https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/in-...x-by-team-dsm/

Hit the cobbles or some gravel? Push a button and lower your tire pressure. Back on tarmac? Push a button and go back to higher pressure.

It's hard to imagine that anybody but the racers would bother, particularly with the €3000 price tag. I doubt that they really are aiming at the consumer market, but somebody will buy it....

WhyFi

Beyond tweaking for surface conditions, it'd also give you the creature comfort of not topping off every/other ride or possibly being a band aid for a slow leak that won't quite seal, allowing you to ride on.

I think that it's pretty cool, and could see the tech dropping in price dramatically once the patent runs out - there are already inexpensive, small inflators on the market.

Germany_chris

Here’s a bicycle innovation I can get behind

JohnJ80

One more thing to take your eyes off the road and fool with while riding.

mschwett 

not sure why that would have to be, i assume you can brake and shift without taking your eyes off the road. it describes it as having controls mounted on the bars. it could be as simple as low, medium, high on a lever, and it could also easily be automated.

even so, i'd be willing to bet that the safety benefits of riding at the correct pressure for the surface outweigh a split second glance at a button or readout by orders of magnitude.

JohnJ80

”Orders of magnitude”? Way more than a little hyperbole in this. One order of magnitude is 10x. 3 would be 1000x.

GhostRider62

For 3 grand, I'd expect accelerometers and real-time dynamic pressure regulation.

mschwett 

if there’s a switch on the bars that let you go from 40 to 70 to 100 psi, and i hit it to air down for a rough, wet surface, that tiny increase in crash risk for the split second when i hit the switch is an infinitesimal increase in my crash risk. similar to the “distraction” of shifting.

it’s then a better, safer ride for the duration of the rough, wet descent. measurably safer. so yes, orders of magnitude. i’m familiar with the term. or are you saying that it doesn’t matter what your tire pressure is, so it’s never any safer at all to change it?

JohnJ80

ok then. It’s your $3000. 😂

personally, while I am very tuned into the importance of tire inflation, this seems to me to be laughably beyond even the needs of anyone but at best a world tour rider and even then is questionable.

Seattle Forrest

I would use this for a small price and weight penalty. Unless and until, I'll keep at it the old fashioned way.

JohnJ80

Exactly. And I doubt that will ever come to pass. But I could be wrong.

mschwett 

oh, trust me, i would never buy this at anywhere near this cost and presumably weight/fuss factor. i just find the “modern stuff is so distracting!” argument kind of silly. but then again i also don’t think things like turn signal levers, headlight switches, gear shifts, speedometers and tachometers are distracting in my cars 😂😂

but i think it would be awesome to not have to worry about airing up before or during a ride. tell it to keep the pressure at XX unless otherwise stated and forget it until you get a flat!

JohnJ80

you might want to spend some time learning about task overload and human factors issues in pretty much everything (including bikes) but specifically cars and planes which have had major catastrophes from exactly those sorts of issues.

For example in the case of the first major crash of a “Jumbo Jet”, the flight crew of an L1011 got all wrapped around whether the landing gear light was working or not while the plane lost altitude until they flew it into the ground.

Similar problems occur with all sorts of things. When humans are moving, human factors become critically important for safety issues. So yeah, this stuff matters.

These were *highly* trained professionals who requalify periodically but yet got distracted by their most basic controls which they used every day and upon which they had thousands of hours of flight time

And there are countless examples of that happening in cars which you seem to think isn’t an important issue or at least a funny one.

Fact of the matter is that humans don’t do well with tasks that require prolonged concentration where nothing unusual is happening until it is and then they miss it.

But it really doesn’t matter because the whole thing is of limited utility at great expense anyhow. Not likely to ever be seen on the consumer level and probably nothing more than an experiment on the World Tour.

OshkoshBiker

How about “Alexa, increase tire pressure 3.2 psi.”