http://www.mavic.com/road/news/news.762.aspx

Didn’t see this one coming, oh no…

they call their wheelsets “arses” ?

This is quite good: ‘This exchange will start from 31st of March 2009. Until this date, and to facilitate the continued use of your bicycle, Mavic will offer a set of Aksium wheel that customers will keep after they have received the replacement R-SYS front wheel.’

However, it obviously shows they think there’s an immediate danger to the user, or they’d have waited until March to pipe up about it!

These wheels have been out for quite some time havent they? Around a year? And only now have they decided that they are not safe to use. I think thats pretty poor.

“These wheels have been out for quite some time havent they? Around a year? And only now have they decided that they are not safe to use. I think thats pretty poor.”

Or that’s when the problems have started showing up. Pre launch testing is one thing, what the public do with stuff is another 🙂

Or they’re now seeing enough failures that the lawyers reckon it’s cheaper to do a recall than risk paying out a big damages claim…

It’s like a new medicine – they can only test new drugs on a limited number of people and for not very long, and it’s only once on the market being used by millions of people for years does the true safety profile emerge.

If a failure like that one above happens only twice a year in 10,000 customers each doing 1000 miles per year, so twice in 10 million miles, that is too much but was impossible to predict from a limited development programme. So it could be understandable that this recall is now.

The design did look dodgy from the get go IMO and they had the aero dynamics of a house, so no great loss.

Wow, that pic is scary!

Are these wheels something like five thousand pounds or something silly? And they have the potential to snap like that???

Call me a luddite, but I’ve always preferred simple, 32-spoke hand-built wheels, to these new-fangled things. I’ve seen and heard of several fancy wheelsets failing, but never seen a conventional one go, other than one cracked rim (pothole) and the odd broken spoke. But never failing in a potentially lethal manner, like that one above.

(Jumps up and down, shouting ‘I told you so!’)

Also check out the wheel to the left in

Gallery