You are way too generous with your appraisal of a profit seeking conglomerate.
I think that rate of failure is way too high on a critical part that could cause you to lose your teeth. Just going anecdotally based on the number of broken cranks I’ve seen posted to cycling forums, I’d say that this crank seems to break at a rate of 1000x more frequently than any other crankset out there.
So we should decide if recalls should occur based on the anecdotal “data” of who / how many people are posting on IG and cycling forums vs. the actual data?
The numbers are literally posted for everyone to see…1/2 of 1% failure rate. Again, staggeringly low.
Do you work for Shimano? If Shimano cranks are a 1% failure rate and Campagnolo and Sram have a .001% failure rate then Shimano has a problem.
Would you fly in a plane with a 1% chance of falling out of the sky?
It’s a 0.59% reported failure rate.
There are actuarial guidelines or models for estimating the actual failure rate but I would not be surprised if it was closer to 2-3%.
Nope…just a career spent in consumer product goods (including bikes), so I have a pretty good idea of product failure rates.
Where is the data showing a .001% failure rate?
False equivalence. Cranks are not airplanes or remotely similar. Further, airplanes are finished goods by themselves. Cranks are part of a finished good (a bicycle).
True…that is fair point.
I’m sick of the ‘show me the data’ argument on the internet.
You can believe whatever you want about these cranks. If you want some data, search google images for broken crankset.
Take out the 40 year cranks and the bottom bracket issues that are not a broken crankset and Shimano broken crankset outnumber everything else by a huge margin.
It seems clear to me that these cranksets suck and they were finally recalled. I’ve seen pics of these broken, glued together pieces of junk posted on weight weenies for years and now finally they have been recalled.
These are just my opinions. No data will be provided. This is an internet forum of opinions.
I think your industry opinion is flawed. There are certain bicycle parts like a stem, fork steerer or crankset where a .59% failure rate is completely unacceptable.
The failure rate discussion is interesting. I follow around 200 people on Strava and have seen 6 different people post about their broken Shimano cranksets in the past few years.
People generally seem to report failures on rides in their Strava titles or descriptions. I see broken shifter cables, broken spokes, cut tires, etc. Of course, this is a very limited world view, but seeing so many of one type of crankset failure, while seeing almost no others is surprising.
Researching this brings up some unique anecdotes. Here’s a rider who broke a 6800 crank while riding, and then three years later broke the 9000 crank that was the warranty replacement. Terrible luck to be such a statistical overrepresentative.
That’s cool…I’m kinda tired of people making up data and posting it as some type of winning argument, so… 
What is the reported failure rate for these items?
Looking at images, this doesn’t appear to be why my 2018 Ultegra chainring warped and couldn’t take a heavy load without throwing the chain to the outside.
Maybe it was on its way to delaminating.
I replaced it with a new Ultegra crankset (not recalled) but grabbed an Absolute Black chainring instead.
Yikes. I’ve got recalled Ultegra cranks, but from Stage. Anyone if Stages is processing the recall?
I don’t think so…you’ll need to start with your LBS. See below from the Escape article linked in Chad’s first post…
“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.
They estimated in the article that 1% would need to be replaced. Who knows why that is, but this a different story if that is true.
I’ve reached out to Stages (and 4iiii) for comment on this. Looks like the R6800/R8000 NDS (Left only) isn’t bonded, so not part of this recall. Shimano should be a LOT clearer on this.
There’s a few things that I don’t feel comfortable with in all of this…
They would have done well to also provide more details of what the inspection process looks like….as it is now, they make it sound like some shop kid is gonna look at your crank and say “yay or nay”.
If the issue is internal corrosion, then obviously a visual inspection only covers that moment in time…there is nothing to say it won’t fail 2, 10 or 24 months down the road.
Shimano really needs to provide more transparency here.
I’ve just completed the Shimano TEC training (videos/quiz) on this… and that’s all it is.
Ooof….that seems like an issue.
So Shimano just assumes if your crank has made it this far, it is not gonna fail in the future?
Hmmmm……
That worries me. They need a simple blanket no-questions-asked swap. (Which would no doubt be extremely expensive for them).
Shimano just made the lawsuit payout of a post-inspection failure that results in a crash 1000x that of a pre-inspection lawsuit and probably made the likelihood of such a rider filing a lawsuit about 1000x more likely.
What happens if the shop mechanic gets it wrong? Is it then the shop’s fault?
Think they are doing US only, because law suits there are both much more likely and much more expensive.