>>1386297Get woke go broke?
>>1386403The Nitto noodles and rando bars are pretty standard dropbars though. Cantilever is easy to dial in, tho it still requires a bit of grip strength and sucks more than other rim brakes in bad weather due to lack of mechanical advantage. Discs are a really obvious improvement on anything but a pure road racing bike though. Who even knows where the racing scene will go, though. Probably will become a full e-sport where a "racing bike" is pic related.
>>1386390Not adopting disc brakes and digging his heels in was a dumb mistake, for sure. Not offering anything that current customers want to upgrade to is another problem. Like if someone bought an Atlantis 10 years ago, did the company release anything new and interesting to get them to buy another bike? Nope. When you look at their current lineup, it's stuff that they've been selling forever, a buncha terrible shit that nobody wants, a fucking mixte, and too many overlapping models.
But ultimately what kills Riv (and VO and Soma and lots of other companies) is e-bikes. Like, yeah, I get the opposition to them and the amount of waste they create, but 99% of people want stuff to be easier and more convenient, and e-bikes give a strong initial impression of being those things. Then people who buy them find out that they have to maintain them and that cycling still sucks in most places because cycling infrastructure still sucks in most places, and then the bikes get stuffed into a garage or put on CL, like most any other bicycle. Eventually the mainstream industry will shift to a subscription model, which is why there are so many companies hemorrhaging money trying to be the market leader in that area. Or society will collapse and demand for non-electric bikes in good condition will spike through the roof. Whichever.
And yeah, Riv could have been QBP, had Grant moved production to Taiwan ASAP and not halfassed establishing a distribtion/dealer network.
