So I'm close to buying my first modern bike computer. Yeah, behind the times, have just been using phone-based Strava for years but now want to watch some numbers while riding.
I have been weighing Wahoo vs Garmin for a while and the one thing that keeps hanging me up is people talking about their Garmin crashing/rebooting/etc midride or while uploading and losing ride data. Strava has only messed up one ride for me ever, so >99% reliability and I'm having a hard time with the chance of this happening.

Of course, there are far more Garmin users out there so maybe I just haven't heard of the Wahoo issues?

Thus, I'm curious about Wahoo users (specifically the Elemnt, but Bolt and Roam users also) if you have ever had Wahoo lose or otherwise mangle your ride data? Can I expect Wahoo to save and successfully upload my ride data 99.9% of the time?

I have an Elemnt Bolt and love it. Simple to use, no touch screen problems, works with my Di2 hidden buttons and I have yet to lose any data. Highly recommend.

I've had the Bolt since January and when it doesn't sync after a ride, all you need to do is open the elemnt app and it will sync right away. I upgraded from the Garmin 520 and I prefer the Bolt.

Nope.

Had the Bolt since it came out and never lost anything. Not to bash on Garmin, but I've had issues losing rides/freezing with a Forerunner 235, 610 and Edge 1000. I'm sure others have had nothing but good experiences with Garmin products.

Nope. Never.

Never had my Bolt lose/corrupt a ride. Goes to Strava fine, every time so far since I bought it.

Welcome change from the Edges 205/305/705/1000..... that caused the Fit File Repair Tool to have to be 3rd-party written by a random German software engineer for MS Access....because Garmin could not be bothered to support their hardware and software properly.

Never lost a ride and never lost my screen or needed a reboot mid-ride. Been using it since December '18 and have clocked 50 rides so far.

I have over 22,000 miles on my Elemnt and never lost a ride because of it. It works nicely with the app on my Pixel 3 XL and all the phones I had before.

To be fair to Garmin, I've only ever had one corrupted ride in the year that I've had my Edge 520. It chewed up a good portion of that ride but kept overall stats like total work and distance, so it autocalculated a new FTP of 24 W/kg and average moving speed of 155 mph.

Have never had an issue in 2+ years with my Bolt. Have never used Garmin though.

This is my second season with the ELEMNT Mini. I’ve never lost a ride.

Me too. I had it happen many times with my old Garmin 510.

Completely? No, but I did have an issue where it lost position for an hour or more. This happened on two consecutive rides and was just after a firmware update. It may have been another firmware update that cleaned up the problem, but I don't know for sure.

I'm curious where were you when it lost position? Regular ride route or way out on the middle of nowhere?

I have had a few rides where Strava teleported me as well, but I think that was some issues with the phone and data settings.

I'd have to look up the rides, but IIRC it failed to lock on to my position at the start of the rides, which is in the middle of a large-enough metro area. Phone/data settings shouldn't affect the Wahoo, though. That I'm aware of, it only uses internal GPS, not tethered phone positioning (which can often lean on cell tower triangulation).

While only 3,053 miles over 82 rides, have not had a single issue with my Bolt. Nada.

My old Edge 520 rebooted mid-ride the second day I owned it, and would GPS glitch so often I had to have fitfiletools.com in my bookmarks bar.

Wahoo devices seem good. I have a Tickr. But in late April Wahoo Fitness was updated for the first time in a couple of years and reliability suffered. Fitness was the most stable and lowest resource activity app I'd used. Now it's about as reliable as Strava, which means it glitches just often enough to be annoying. But it seems like the glitches have cleared up on my Android and iOS phones the past week.

Same here. Probably 6K miles and 150+ rides so far with it, pouring rain, mud covering the screen, sweat on it, summer heat in the sun, freezing temps, on and off road etc. Done 10+ hour rides and although not required plugged it in to a portable charger at some point during the ride for a battery boost and still no issues. Full size Elemnt.

Of course, there is a simple solution if you don't want a GPS computer. Just get a "dumb" computer and use Strava on your phone to track rides.

I moved from a Garmin 510 to a Bolt and made the right decision. I had a few (1-2) dropped rides with the Garmin but it was the touchscreen I never liked. The bolt has a great contrast screen, and nice tactile buttons. No sync, WiFi or Bluetooth problems with the bolt.

Thank you for your valuable and relevant input to this conversation.

Yes, God forbid someone on a *forum* offers an alternative point of view. Can't have that, can we?

Appreciate the attempt at sarcasm, though.

Yup. Just 3 days ago too. But it's mostly my fault.
I uploaded the ride to my phone. As it was "syncing" the app shut down. I reopened and saw that the ride was upload with correct numbers except the GPS showed I jumped from US to overseas, europe somewhere and came back.
Clearly corrupt, I erased the ride off my phone. And that action was "pushed" from phone to delete off the device. I had 0 idea it worked that way. My plan was to reupload from Wahoo to app again after deleting.

So yeah. While I think pushing that delete to the device is extremely dumb, it was 99% my fault for actually deleting it. Corrupt GPS data didn't help the situation though.

I’ve had pretty much all of them. I got the Elemnt just after it came out and that was a bit of a trial, but I only lost one ride and that was in that phase. Rapidly, Wahoo increased the stability and reliability of their software. The screen is great, and even though it’s low tech as far as displays go, it’s got the best readability in direct sunlight.

I’d have to rate Wahoo's reliability as tops in all of the bike computers out there. Garmin doesn't even come close.

Where the Elemnt falls down is in it's navigation capability. It's there, but there are no street names and that same display that is easy to read in daylight is also low res which means the maps can be very difficult to decipher. It's sort of best described as the kind of navigation that works when you pretty much know where you're going. But it’s got great connectivity with Strava, RideWithGPS and others for routes.

Set up is terrific with the use of their smartphone app.

FWIW, I have the ELEMNT, my daughter has the BOLT. I also have a Garmin Edge 1000 (meh) and a Hammerhead Karoo (work in progress but getting there).

FWIW, I think DCRainmaker kind of nailed the Garmin world with this article. Accurate based on my experience, maybe even a little magnanimous. The comments in the article are really illuminating.

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/06/...stability.html

Market and feature leader but - at best - mediocre reliability. I'd say that's pretty accurate.