One thing is clear, whoever wants to rate products, must be able to make differentiations. Whereas other magazines often find modest phrases, BIKE supply their readers with facts, scores and marks. It is a matter of fact that for this purpose you cannot only rely upon the impressions of the test riders. Manufacturers invest huge amounts of money into the development of their products, at the same time the optimisation potentials shrink. To determine even marginal differences, our test laboratory has been equipped with state-of-the-art technology from the beginning. In our test laboratory the test procedure for every bike takes six to eight hours, i.e. with nearly 200 mountain bikes tested per year, these tests produce enormous costs and are highly time consuming.
To keep pace with the development in the industry, our measurement and test procedures are improved continuously. Today, we’ve made another great step forward. With a weight of nearly one ton a test monster called Triceratops represents the centrepiece of the new BIKE test. Zedler-lnstitut für Fahrradtechnik und -Sicherheit invested three years into the project. With their bundled technology the Triceratops allows us different measurements on a single test stand: the spring characteristic curves and the characteristic curves of the fork, the wheel trajectory curves and the stiffnesses of the front frame triangle and of the rear frame.
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Author: Josh Welz, chief editor
