Re: Is the hub dynamo headed for an even smaller niche?

On Nov 26, 4:34 pm, Andreas Oehler <andreas.oeh...@xxxxxx> wrote:
Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:57:50 -0800 (PST), Andre Jute:



All of that may be true, but on the majority of Continental bikes
there is a mixed battery/dynohub system already for instance on both
my Trek and Gazelle; their rear lights are battery-powered.

The continent doesn't consist of the Netherlands only...

I didn't say it does, Andreas. But why don't you ask where more bikes
are sold than in Germany?

In germany and
most countries on its borders 95% of the dynamo-equipped bikes also powert
the rear light this way.

That's the sort of selective, hairsplitting, statistics I used to hear
in boardrooms a lot. The headline fact is that The Netherlands is a
monster bike market and if you don't have it in your corner, you're
marketing into a niche. Read the title of this thread.

The premise we're discussing is that the market for hub dynamos may
not be growing fast enough for Shimano, in part because bike commuting
has not taken off in what is still the richest market in the world,
the USA, in part because cheap competition is entering the market, but
mostly because batteries and LEDs are now so good that the raison
d'etre for hub dynamos has been seriously undermined, and that Shimano
sooner or later might decide it is happy to leave the bottom end of a
static market to the Chinese and the elitist -- look up elite and
elitist and discover it's a dig -- end of the market to Schmidt.

Thus the cyclist has to carry spare batteries anyway.

You are right: This is a stupid idea of those bike manufacturers.

Holy maloney, what a novel way to make friends and influence people
among your biggest potential customers, call them stupid by name. If
you worked for me, Andreas, you'd be out of the door today.

The
piece of wire to connect the rear lamp to the front (and the dynamo)
weights less than a spare set of batteries.

Of course it does. It is also ugly, and expensive if it has to be
guided through the frame and the stand to hide it.

In any event, your entire argument is another example of misdirection:
that the wire is lighter doesn't matter against the weight of the
dynamo. If your argument is weight, a pair of LED torches up the front
and a Cateye 1100 rear light, fully fitted with batteries, and with
four (not two) spare batteries *still* weigh a lot less than a hub
dynamo.

Most cyclist over-estimate the run time of modern batterie-driven rear
lights. It often takes less than 20 hours to drain the batteries so far to
reach only half the regular brightness.

Crap. I'm a professional skeptic: I don't overestimate anything. And I
have stopwatches, two, on each of my bikes, and another set of several
stopwatches and accumulators on my wrist. I checked the running time
of those lights on fresh batteries, and the Spanninga was also checked
by the Dutch bicyclists' association who published very impressive
photographs. In any event, what does it matter to the cyclist if the
battery life of his rear German-legal light (a guarantee that it will
be crap, no flasher even) is 100 or even 50 hours rather than 200?

I operate all the lights on my bikes all the time that I'm on them,
including in daylight as daylight running lights, and every hour on my
bikes is electronically logged not once but several times. You might
have been right in the days of the NiCads and the lead acid batteries
but the world has moved on a long way with NiMH and Lipo batteries.

Forget to switch it off once - and
the batteries are gone.

Try to keep up, Andreas. All my OEM battery bike lights (by Spanninga
and by Basta for the Gazelle house brand) have built-in light and
motion sensors; a few minutes after the bike stops moving, they go out
and save the batteries. Electronics is a wonderful thing. You might
make an effort to discover it; I can recommend a good introduction
from the juvenile section of the library.

Andreas

Engineers, unless already civilized by a stint in management, really
should consult their wives before they stick their noses into
marketing discussions. Marketing is quite different from wishful
thinking, and the law, even German law, was made by men, and
specifically not to be carved in stone but to be remade by other men.
Those two latter ideas are connected by a lever; you can decide for
yourself where the lever is pivoted.

All the same, I shall probably fit a hub dynamo on my new bike. Though
I don't commute, and have no urgent reason to be out on my bike after
dark (I take the occasional night ride in summer purely for the
pleasure), I'm a belt and braces sort of guy -- and, unlike almost
everyone else, I don't care about weight on my bike (a heavy bike just
brings my heart rate into the right bracket faster and keeps it there
longer), and anyway, a sidewall dyno is aesthetically just about the
ugliest thing on a bike. But don't count on Gazelle and Trek to be
managed by belt and braces sorta guys (and gals) -- if I were advising
their marketing departments, I'd right now be writing a monograph on
batteries and LEDs and calling the suppliers together for a small,
significant private chat aka headknocking, leading with the question,
"Why haven't you told me this before I found it necessary to tell
you?" My betting is that there is no need for headknocking, that the
suppliers are already telling the manufacturers, and showing them
mockups of battery lights they will be cataloguing for the 2010 or
2011 ranges.

That little Pifco torch with which I started this thread is really
frightening good, and would be at 50 euro, never mind the 5 euro I
paid.

Andre Jute
Marketing, contrary to uninformed opinion, is the peak of rationality
.

Relevant Pages

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