Stop! Put down that phone! Get your hand out of your pants! Something incredibly important has happened! Specialized have released a new garvel biek:
Yeah, I know: “So what? I took my hand out of my pants for this?” Well, sure, the last thing the world needed was the eleventy millionth gravel bike. But while pretty much every new gravel bike is unnecessary, this one is aggressively unnecessary, because it features a completely new type of rear suspension:
This is the result of a problem that was “diabolically hard to solve:”
And it in no way resembles anything any bike company has ever done before:
Naturally, I high-tailed it right on over to the Specialized page, where they confirmed my suspicions that this bike is in fact absurd:
But, you know, when you’re inventing new problems to solve, you’ve got to “Innovate Or Die:”
I’m old enough to remember when Specialized were all peninent about stranding customers with “incompatible and redundant parts and products”–you know, because it was last year. Meanwhile, this new Diverge not only has all kinds of pivots but it will also ship with two different seatposts, which doesn’t sound wasteful at all. Even the person who came up with the idea for this thing says it’s completely unnecessary:
“Your body is the perfect suspension and gives you total control, but here’s a $14,000 bike with a wiggly seatpost” is perhaps the most audacious sales pitch I’ve ever heard.
But is your body a potential source of annoying creaking sounds like a high-tech wiggly seatpost is?
Well, to be fair, of course it is, especially as you get older. But why compound the problem?