Looks like they finally had to bite the bullet after MANY clear reports of problems that we have seen around for years. Better late than never?
Will have to dig into this as I suspect I have more than one instance of these that could be affected. Making it more ‘fun’ is the fact that I have 3 left-side crank power meters among them…
And upon just watching the Shimano video… cranks with 3rd party power meters installed (Stages & 4iiii to name the most likely) are not covered under the Shimano warranty policy, but Shimano is “making an exception” by choosing to include and replace as appropriate.
However, if these 3rd party PM cranks are found to have an issue and need replacement, the new crank will be a normal Shimano version WITHOUT a power meter.
Per the EC article:
Some affected cranks will also have had third-party power meters installed, but Shimano says it has a plan for that.
“Any items that are found to fail during inspection and that are sent back to Shimano will be replaced free of charge without the third-party power meter attached. Shimano will be providing a rebate in the form of a check to the consumer where the consumer can use that towards the replacement of the third-party power meter.”
Those rebates will range from US$300-325 / CA$400-430 for single-sided power meters, and US$500 / CA$650 for dual-sided ones: perhaps not enough to have new third-party power meters installed on the replacement cranks, but better than nothing.
Fascinating that it has taken this long for them to issue a recall…I would love to understand what was the mitigating factor that caused them to issue the recall.
As suspected, the incident rate of these failures is astonishingly low…basically 1/2 of 1 percent. This aligns with their claim that they expect less than 1% of the inspected cranks to require replacement. My guess (and it is only a guess) would be that it it was the sheer number of reports, and not the percentage of incidents, that finally caused them to issue a recall.
I have an Ultegra and a DA crank that fall under the recall…but the DA crank is a Stages unit (although I am not currently using it as my PM). The Ultegra crank is a no-brainer to deal with…will have to decide what I want to do about the DA crank, I guess.
Yeah, I am not sure what I can share but for actual units requiring replacement, the values are much higher than $25 with all the material costs and dealer service payment.
The only saving grace here is that the presumed amount of actual replacements is a small fraction of the base number affected in the total date & production range covered.
Hypothetical number I just made up, in this scenario it cost them $25/complete process (to furnish new product and process old product). I was being overly conservative with the number.
What I am more impressed with is that they sold (at minimum) 760,000 units between June 1, 2012 to June 30, 2019.
That is 7-years or 108,571 units a year for Ultegra and Dura-ace only, it just gave me more prospective at how big Shimano cycling really is.
I have no idea what the number will be, but you are also assuming a 100% compliance rate. No way they will get close to that number…many of those cranks are no longer in service and even more consumers will never see the bulletin…and then even more won’t bother to take their cranks in for inspection.
Shimano estimates that the replacement rate will be less than 1% (again, which aligns with the failure rate data), so their actual exposure from a replacement perspective will probably be relatively low for a recall of this size. Inspection labor will be the biggest component, I would guess.
You are correct, let me state it another way as sometimes I get excited and dont complete my entire thought process.
If they manufactured 760,000 units and the manufacturing cost of them was only $25 that’s $19M in just manufacturing cost only. That’s just such a big number to me, helped me grasp how big the company is.
They most likely are closer to $130 for manufacturing though.
But honestly, those numbers didn’t surprise me that much. I would actually say it emphasizes how few high bikes the suppliers sell in a given year vs. the total number of bike imports.
I wonder if this is a factor of how many people buy high end bikes and then don’t ride them much! As I personally know quite a few people who have had Hollowtech crankset failures (including me), and my sample size certainly isn’t in the high enough hundreds for that to be 0.5%. But I do suspect that the people I know are much higher volume than the average.
Yeah, usage almost certainly factors into the failure rate…I would also say environmental conditions and how the cranks are used also play a role. My guess would be that the failure rate is higher in areas with greater humidity and that those who ride in the rain often will also see a higher failure rate.
It is worth reading the Escape collective article posted at the top of the thread…they have more details about the inspection process, what cranks will be used for replacements (a unique crank based on the 12 spd design) as well as updated info re: how 3rd party power meter cranks will be handled (they are giving consumers checks / rebates).
Call me cynical but it’s probably cheaper to delay this recall for years, pay out the few injured riders, and then make it an inspection recall. Riders with old bikes hanging in garages aren’t going to be keen to take their bike apart and ship it off for an inspection.
They don’t have to…they just need to take it to an authorized dealer and have it inspected.
But the data doesn’t really back up your cynicism…it is a .5% failure rate. Statistically insignificant, almost. I’d be thrilled with any of our products having an actual failure rate that low. They likely did not have a recall before this because there was not any data indicating a recall was warranted.
