And ride like bikes, too.
Interesting point.
It’s clear that telescopic forks have some pretty huge disadvantages (and one huge advantage*) that riders have learned to ride around through successive generations of riders. Also, fork manufacturers have tweaked the design relentlessly for 30 odd years to reduce these disadvantages as much as possible.
It’s interesting that whenever someone comes up with a non-telescopic solution people’s reactions are so positive. These solutions are more or less the equivalent of the early elastomer forks and yet people often still feel these other solutions are at least as good. Or at least, the advantages and the disadvantages cancel each other out.
If these designs had 30 years of being optimised I suspect people would look at telescopic forks and wonder how we ever managed to ride those things.
But that’s not going to happen, because people like their bikes to look like bikes.
*the huge advantage telescopic forks have is the direct connection from the handlebars to the axle. Any non-telescopic fork solution is going to have to minimise that loss of connection. If they’d have had 30 years of design iterations to do so I doubt it would be an issue.
