IMHO, anyone who knew the players involved in that "test" could have predicted the results before the test took place. That said, I think Greg Peek's Longbikes tandem were exceptional -- which is what the testing was intended to show -- but that's about it. Longbikes came into being about the same time as Merdian Cycles and both brands failed to achieve their ambitious goals for displacing Santana as the "new benchmark" for tandems. Roger Haga, who was involved early on in Santanas tour business, was retained by Longbikes to do a lot of "marketing" to help launch the brand, much of which was controversial and not well received by the tandem enthusiast community... all of which is documented in the Hobbes archives.

For context, Meridian probably produced and sold a lot more tandems than Longbikes because the man behind Merdian, Jim Leis, has been a key player at Santana for many years, involved in product development, operations, and marketing so he knew what worked; however, Meridian ultimately failed in a big and ugly way. Longbikes still exists and may still build tandems as a custom order, but for the most part have abandoned the upright tandem bike market and focused their heavy capital investment in bicycle fabication facilities and support on the Recumbent market, to include buying the rights to the Ryan Recumbent line of bikes. So, while that 'report' may be interesting, all that I'd take away from it was that Longbikes manufacturered an excellent bike that was on par with three other excellent tandems where the biggest differences aside from material and tester bias would have been their tandem handling, as all three builders had a different philosphy on tandem steering geometry.

I've not seen that description, but I can tell you that Santana has played around with single bikes a couple times. Once, many years ago, they built a few all-terrain bikes (very rare) and then a few years back they solicited feedback from a number of the better custom single bike builders on geometry as part of a very limited build of Scandium single bikes. Santana used what they had in hand for components -- 1.25" headsets and 160mm rear spacing -- to build these bikes which were ostensibly intended to allow them to evaluate how well Easton's Scandium aluminum would be to work with and to hold up as a tandem frame material. These were coveted by Santana-devotees and everyone once in a while one will show up in the second hand market. While it could be argued that these single bikes were built for super-big riders, that is also true of every Santana tandem. A good thing for very large teams. There is also at least one Beyond single bike that was commissioned by Jay Leno as a gift for former US President Bill Clinton after it was determined that the Beyond tandem Leno had given to President Clinton and his wife Hillary, the Senator from New York, was not allowed under the Senate Rules for gift giving. I believe Leno may still have the Beyond tandem but can't be sure.