Mountain bikers have been leaning on motors and batteries to get us up hills for a while, and GPS systems to get us back home safely for even longer. Shimano has Autoshift and SRAM developed Eagle Powertrain with Auto Shift so you don’t have to bother with gear changes anymore. And then there’s Magura, which introduced Bosch eBike ABS so you can haul on the anchors on slippy roots without a second thought.  But then last week we had a glimpse of the future, and boy was it weird. You probably saw it already, that robot bike doing trials riding, but it got me thinking. If machines are already helping our legs, brains and fingers on the bike, how long before we’re relying on robots to help us ride technical trails too? And in case you missed, here’s the vid… If your initial reaction is one of Black Mirror horror at this dystopian vision of mountain biking, then I’ve got bad news. Worrying about machine intervention in mountain biking is as pointless as panicking about AI. It’s already way ahead of where we realise it is and already has a longer tail in tech than you probably recognise too.  I’m not just talking about the change in attitude to e-bikes that’s occurred in the past few years. I can remember the outrage people had to reviews of early eebs, they said it was encouraging cheaters and wasn’t proper mountain biking. Now Mick Kirkman has had to go into hiding after daring to suggest all is not wonderful about augmented wattage riding, in his e-bike love-hate relationship opinion piece. Long before websites like this were a thing I can remember regular writer Paul Burwell saying in MBR’s precursor MBi magazine that suspension was pointless because we had two feet of travel in our arms. Want to get really retro? The original ‘mountain bike’ riders in California broke the stagnation of a century of road bike design by breeding Italian thoroughbreds with local beach cruisers to create their Clunkers and the rest is hysterical history.  They’re all tech advances that have allowed us to go off-road and have a laugh more easily and they’ve been going on for nearly fifty years. So while you’re obviously welcome to draw your own line of indignation in the dirt and declare ‘that’s enough for me’ it’s not going to stop progress. What’s really interesting is that the basics you’d need to start creating rider assist are actually largely already present in current cutting edge bikes – told you it had already crept up on us.  Bosch’s Race motor-equipped e-bikes have already got a pre-programmed surge to hoik us up small steps if we stop pedalling. RockShox Flight Attendant uses an array of accelerometers to create a constantly updating 3D ride map to control the compression behaviour of suspension. What if it linked to rebound too and at the same time as it unleashed an undamped deep stroke return, the motor gave a sudden trials bike …Continue reading »