I just don't get why the Peloton thing is so popular when you can get a smart trainer and a bike you can actually take outside for sooo much cheaper. You could even sign up for Zwift and a Trainer Road subscription and come out waaay ahead of $50/month.

The protocols coming out of these things have become pretty much a standard as well. Get an ANT dongle for your computer and the data can be consumed from so many apps, even an open source project like Golden Cheetah. Or just read the data from a head unit that already supports it.

One obvious reason is that no one cares what the exercise bike weighs and it will never be exposed to dirt or rain. That allows you to make a drivetrain that can trivially last past the useful life of the equipment without any maintenance ever. Meanwhile on the road bike you strapped to the trainer you have a chain, cassette and chainrings for no good reason - all of it ends up feeding into a variable resistance unit anyway!

Similarly putting a road bike you have used extensively on the trainer back on the street generally means doing a complete overhaul - you sweat salt water all over it and don't want your alloy handlebars to break in half because it corroded underneath the bar tape.

Ceterum censeo: we should focus on fixing the reasons that many people, particularly women, feel unsafe riding a real bike outside that they would rather stare at this screen going nowhere inside. Most of them without the mandatory two box fans blasting a hurricane their way, it makes me die inside just seeing that.

Of all the ways to crash - mechanical failure, operator error, 3rd party - this is the one that keeps you up at night? We come from very different cycling worlds...

That doesn’t seem like a bad thing? Instead for cycling, it seems...like an inherent property I’d expect a cyclist to actually anticipate and empathize with.

I have 3 friends that were hit by cars last year, 2 bikes and one e-scooter.

None of them were at fault.

He with the most lugnuts wins.

The cemetaries are full of people who were "right".

1) Distracted drivers. And it has no relation to age. I see old people using their phones, I see young people using their phones. This is number 1, by a huge margin, and it is just getting worse. I never use my phone, other than for navigation, while driving. Not even hands free. Leave a message.

2) Bicyclists that don't follow the rules of the road. Stupid young kids using both side of the road, and sidewalks, I sort of understand. We were all stupid young kids at some point in our lives. But there is no excuse for stupid adults. If you have a drivers license, you know the rules, they are not that hard. Where I live, more than two thirds of bicyclists ride to the left, against traffic. Lately, maybe as much as three quarters. My kids (young adults) all ride on the right, when they ride. They were taught that from day one. Does no one teach bicycling to their kids?

So I am out riding, trying to be aware of the roadway, blind spots, cars (worse, trucks on narrow roads), and as I crest a hill I meet another bicycle coming straight at me. WTF?

You're missing the point. It's not indoor cycling, it's more like at home spin class or soul cycle. The customer base is pretty different, and the experience is a lot of what they're looking and paying for.

You'd be surprised how much twiddling and research you need to do to find a correctly sized bike and which smart trainer (elevation? resistance? etc?) to get something that will work for the average person. It's the same reason people go for iPhones or Macs or anything else that 'just works', the time cost for getting to where one can actually use it vs. just unpacking a box w/ a 'good enough' smart bike means that a shiny package like a Peloton will always be preferred for a large chunk of the population.

Honestly prefer training this way to the gamified Zwift experience, there's something deeply off-putting about gluing my eyes to a screen when I'm meant to be focusing on 4x5 intervals. I have a Wahoo Kickr; I hardly ever use it.

I didn't have any prior wrench experience, this was a project in part to gain some. All I had were some Youtube videos, a copy of Leonard Zinn's The Art of Road Bike Maintenance, and some basic tools. I did, however, already know my fitting dimensions.

The bikes I race on are what you'd expect though. More expensive than my car.

As serious road frame design is moving to disc brake and thru axle, something like a 12 year old all aluminum Cannondale or specialized road frame and fork set for QR skewers and 130mm rear should be pretty cheap. Then add basic all aluminum components for stem, bars, seatpost, etc.

I'd still expect to spend $125-200 on the saddle if I want exactly the same model to match my actual on-road bikes.

Can confirm it was still the single most expensive component of the whole bike build, more than the frame, wheels, or groupset even.

Test saddles aren't supposed to be sold to the public; I believe it was a liquidation sale.

Since I built using mostly Shimano or Shimano-compatible groupset parts, their techdocs archive was a goldmine, particularly the dealer manuals and compatibility charts. The site navigation is horrendous but the information is essential.

I’d still recommend the Leonard Zinn but note the most recent edition is 2016, may have omissions for current wheels and groupsets.

Not sure what twiddling you are doing with resistance and elevation, smart trainers pick the resistance based on what the app tells it to do in real time.

By no means can a 'large' chunk of the population afford $2,500 up front plus $60/month.

With a real bike on a trainer some people might even decide to try riding outside, who knows...

Now that said, should you buy a peloton? Unless you're interested in indoor spinning classes don't. Get a tacx neobike, the wahoo kickr bike or the stages bike. They are much better bikes and allow you to use any of the many training platforms out there (zwift, rouvy...). If you're just interested in indoor spinning classes, just get yourself an indoor spinning bike without all the fancy electronics.

I've been riding competivily for a long time and when I moved to Northern Europe from Australia and needed to get myself a trainer for winter, it still made the most sense to get the tacx neobike despite already owning 2 roadbikes and a cyclocross bike.

Where did you get $60/mo from? GP mentioned $50 which is also off base... A peloton sub is $13/mo. The only way you could pay $60/mo is if you’re financing the bike.

The price isn't that bad of a deal for someone inside all the time wanting a great bike to workout and the classes.

Thankfully, I'm kinda a nomad so I haven't done it yet, though the past few months I've been stuck in one location and debated about it.

hard

Try to find one! They're fun and good. It's all fake motivation and such but it's really good if you follow the yellow brick road and do it 2-3 hours a day.

Yeah, I'm surprised. People come into a bike shop and come out with a reasonable bike unless they're really looking for something special. A Kickr stand and a bike which fits you "just works" in my experience. What exactly do you think an average person would need to do beyond that?

I get the appeal of Peloton. First, Peloton is fun. Zwift is so freaking boring. I listen to murder mysteries while on Zwift because I think it's so darn boring. I only do it because I feel like it's a more effective workout. And cost wise, I already have a bike. Second, I know tons of people who don't ever want to bike outside. It's too dangerous or too much logistics.

There are plenty of completely legitimate reasons.

It makes me wish there were an open, real-time, fitness data project that had more easily usable SDKs for these kinds of things (along the same lines as Golden Cheetah).

The classes are fun and they also include other things like strength, yoga, running, etc. There is no way to get classes around me for $12/mo or even $12/session.

Someone who knows what they're doing with road bike mechanic stuff can probably piece together a decent dedicated indoor trainer bike for $1000. Using a combination of used and new components.

Since my commuting distance is fixed, I want the ride to be as hard as possible, otherwise I don't train effectively enough. I should probably trade it for an even shittier one , to up the difficulty level.

This is certainly true, luckily my commute runs along a pedestrian waterfront, and I never go on the road, so I feel safe enough with it. Then again, I wouldn't ride on the road in Greece even with a $10k bike.

Are you riding centuries on a regular basis? Yup, $3000.

Are you just out riding to get some fresh air, sunshine, and exercise? $500 is plenty.

It's heavy? I am only riding twenty miles. Oh, and it has inch and a quarter tires, with a wee bit of tread, and I cannot remember the last time I got a flat tire.

As I opened with, it all depends on your goals.

I've attempted to answer this question before for others, but honestly, I've only ridden zwift once, on someone else's setup, so I can't compare how "good" the experience is.

That said, despite my involvement in the cycling world, I still have no idea how to Zwift. I know I need a bike, a trainer, some kind of device to play the 'game' part, a display, and sensors. Presumably the smart trainer has power built in, but I don't know if I would want BT, or if I'd want ANT and then an ant dongle for my computer/tablet. I know the words Zwift, Watopia, Sufferfest, TrainerRoad, and about 37 others, but don't know the relationship between them. I don't how how the whole ecosystem fits together, what I download, who I pay, and from watching others struggle with it, it's pretty clear there's a non-0 learning curve.

I know for a fact that I COULD figure it out, but that doesn't mean it's for everyone, or all cyclists, or all cardio enthusiasts, or all people into spinning. From the cycling groups I'm in, whenever Zwift comes up, it seems like people are always discussing what components to get to work best together. I'm sure once you get the 'right' components it just works, but it sounds fairly fiddly for newbies.

I also hate riding a real bike indoors. When we had a mag trainer, my wife and I NEVER swapped the bikes out; she wanted me to do it, and so the 'wrong' bike was always on the trainer, and it always felt so damn fragile to me. I'd definitely want to use a dedicated bike for a smart trainer, not one I try to ride outside.

Another (admittedly minor) factor is size. I actually realized that I physically cannot fit a bike+smart trainer in the space our Peloton bike goes in our workout area (with a Peloton treadmill and Precor elliptical).

I'm pretty active in a handful of Peloton FB groups, and it definitely feels like there's a tendency for folks who use Peloton and ride outside to head towards Zwift for their indoor training, but there's also a significant percentage of people who went the other direction, or tried Zwift and didn't like it/found it boring/etc. The video game competition aspect of it looks like a lot of fun to me, but not enough to bother investing in a setup.

So, that's my 2 cents. While I didn't personally make the purchasing decision, I've made a lot of similar ones -- pay a bit extra for something that just works, where someone already did the research and made the decisions for you, and you don't need a new hobby or project to make it work. The same reason I use Apple devices, the same reason I bought a Synology instead of building my own NAS.

It’s a great idea, but I don’t think it’s always the right idea.

But I don't think full open APIs any software can use in this case precludes getting as much security as is possible to get out of the software/electronics side of things. And full open APIs would be super useful for longevity, variety of use, etc.

I guess at least that makes it realistic.

>Hidden electric motors have been used to cheat in real pro cycling. If they can’t always catch it there Peleton etc. have no chance.

Though this is getting off topic, I'm not sure I agree with you. It's not necessary to always catch something in a situation like this after all, as with video games it is more about keeping down the rate, and permabans on discovery with retroactive stat updates may also discourage by raising the risk even if one might get away with any single instance. There is also the fact that stakes are just plain lower, things like Zwift are mostly about fun, getting into shape, and competitions to the extent that competition helps some people with A & B. It's not like there are massive cash prizes and sponsorships and so forth on the line in the same way the pro sports has. So lesser reactions could still work.

And the purely electronic world does have some additional potential tools, if we want to theorize about if a given community really got concerned about cheating. While as this example shows right now the needed data is very minimal, it's not as if an open API couldn't have a lot of biometrics, resulting in major data sets that could be kept around indefinitely. Which obviously has major privacy implications too, but purely from a cheating angle I suspect it'd be a challenge to get everything right vs sufficiently powerful ML analysis on a data set like that from millions.

I mean, at the end of the day the fact is that a human being assisted by an electric motor just isn't thermodynamically the same system. With sufficient resolution (possibly not feasible on real roads, but quite possible for a contained standalone system) the energy budgets and how they interact with human physiology just won't add up right.

Now I personally am not a serious bike rider at all, just casual for exploration of the countryside on my own, and while I have a bunch of family members who are they're all out on roads and aren't into the tech side as much. So I honestly don't have any idea what level of privacy/creep tradeoff people would accept in data collection vs cheating and any other benefits (better personalized AI training suggestions? maybe?). Still though, it's an interesting cat and mouse game, and I'm not sure I'd bet on the mice if the cats have enough data collection, memory and computing power on their side.

All of which not merely could but should even more be open, so that people can see exactly what is going out and have full control over it.

There's have been at least 2 deaths related to use of Strava and probably many unreported near misses, all to have your name at the top of a list on a system you have to pay to use [1]. Cheating is widespread in any online game that has a decent audience, often for no discernable benefit. Humans are not rational, especially when it comes to competition.

[1] https://www.velonews.com/news/road/family-sues-strava-over-d...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/04/cheating_in_b...

...thanks for repeating what I wrote in the fifth sentence, I guess? You could have at least mentioned steroids or something which I didn't cover which would also be easy to use there. But the fact is that like so many things level of effort required matters. Some people will try to cheat anything at any level, either for the rewards or even for the meta challenge of cheating itself. But when talking Big Numbers, millions of people using something, it can still be a big difference if it requires significant effort to cheat vs something trivial, and crypto signed data does raise other active response options too. Even in the electric motor example, is the electric motor output identical in cadence and so on to a human? Does the cheater use it the same way every time? Because if not, that may show up and they can be banned and leader boards recalculated. And cheaters could try to respond in turn, but having to try to hide things via physical systems would be trickier then pure software.

And at any rate, I was taking the poster's concern I was responding to as a given. My point was that even then, I don't think that open APIs are in conflict with doing as well as can be done from the electronics side. It's fine to also say "well, I just don't care about cheating and/or our group would socially moderate it" which I also tried to mention, merely signing an open API wouldn't get in the way of that either. It'd just be an extra open data point to use or not use as a given community wished.

Self reporting only works so far. Leaderboards should be connected to in person events with judges/rules if accurancy is important.

At a previous workplace that showed similiar stats the focus was on personal breakthroughs and personal goals. Leaderboards existed within small groups who met up in person and rode together.

I don’t think so

I also think it doesn't have to be.

There are many things that make regular locks effective at preventing unauthorised entry to your house. Ability to access the lock is not one of them, and neither is knowledge about its principle of operations.

If the high score is what you want you can play a video game.