What's your favorite bike related product failure?

What's yours?

My all time favorite, and I've seen it a couple of times but I never kept a link to it, is when someone tries to improve pedaling efficiency by changing the shape of the crank arms! For some reason that always gets to me. Even when I know it's a spoof

Probably this...

I don't have one...I'm looking for inspiration

square wheels

Pantour hubs. My Mu SL had one. That ended up being one of the reasons I sold it.

Viscount aerospace cast aluminum forks ..

Karma : they may have broken .. sending the guy who stole that bike, face first into the street.

I've designed and built a plethora of bicycle work stands in my time. I've had a couple of pretty good designs and a whole bunch of not-so-good ones. I'm working on one for my SWB recumbent right now. I'll know by this week end whether it's going to be a keeper or kindling.

Both Trek and Cannondale tried to sell recumbent bikes and failed miserably.

Burley too. I've never seen any of the above in real life. I wonder if the designs were bad or if they just lacked the marketing effort.

And Giant did a crank forward: https://www.giant-bicycles.com/en-us/...yle/600/28460/

Trek's version was pushed through by one person at Trek. When that person was transferred, poof! no support. Neither the Trek or Cannondale were good bikes. They would have been better off licensing an existing, established design. I would have loved to see a fat aluminum tube (Cannondale) SWB bike with Lightning geometry.

All the speeds prior to 11.

That is strange looking, like a sorta-'bent/adjustable mini-velo chimera. I'd like to try one of them.

Kinda sad that all the links to the other "related model" bikes from that page are dead. Say what you will about Giant bikes, they come up with some non-traditional ideas. They used to have a nice, practical-looking hybrid that had integrated front and rear racks that had folding extension "wings" that would increase the rack platform area. Can't remember what it was called though.

Please, make it go away:
https://www.gizmag.com/treadmill-bike/14640/

This video makes me really want a Treadmill Bike. Well, not really. (Edit: The gizmag link includes a link to this video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reyt3uiQqI8

Well, the bent world does embrace small wheels, too...

Here's a review of it: https://www.velovision.com/showStory.php?storynum=1219

The people that I've talked to that have them like them, so that's worth something.

Heavy, though - heavier than my trike, even.

Shimano Biopace.

It did not fail due to the engineering or design being bad or the end products lack of quality, it was a marketing failure when Shimano decided to offer this from top to bottom from instead if letting it trickle down from the higher component groups as they have done with everything else.

When you market a product to leisure cyclists and racers at the same time, someone isn't gonna buy it.

There are modern counterparts to these that are getting used successfully at competitive levels.

Shimano also brought us Selecta cranks, a Front Freewheel system, and Positron derailleurs which have not had the same appreciation as Biopace does now as it is appreciated by a fair number of cyclists.

Campagnolo brought us the Valentino groupo... I think they learned to stay out of the consumer market after this.

Speaking of Shimano and failed experiments... how about Dura-Ace 10 Pitch?

Ooohh... Campagnolo's MTB groups, Euclid, Centaur, and Record OR.

The Sachs Elan 12-speed hub. 3.4 kg for just the hub, crazy complex internal layout, quality issues, and a 339% range (although looking at the ratios, they really did get the whole progressively closer ratio steps idea right, most hubs don't do that).

And then the Rohloff came out, at 14 speeds, 1.82 kg for everything, absolutely bombproof, and a 526% range.

You don't like blurry derailleurs ??

cherry picking .. their actual derailleurs, are excellent .. but I run them off Friction bar end shifters..

20 years, now.. my drop bar .. Derailleur touring rig.

I liked the horse on a treadmill powered Bus design , with built in manure collector , I supposed.