All about bicycles, electric-assisted bikes, technology and safety in the press

The most common safety risks that we come across in our daily work around bicycle safety, technology and operating instructions are also published by us in articles in the leading German special-interest magazines TOUR (Europe's road bike magazine no. 1), BIKE (Europe's mountain bike magazine no. 1), MYBIKE and EMTB in order to make this information, which is important for the industry, available to a wider public.

For many years now, the Eurobike Show Daily, trade fair magazine of the annual Eurobike Show, has also given us the opportunity to publish our view of major developments in the cycle industry in full-page articles.

We also speak regularly in independent expert presentations about all areas of bicycle technology and the bicycle market. In addition, we are quoted by further special-interest magazines of the industry and the trade as well as increasingly by radio and television in their media reports, which shows us that we are spot on with our advice. The section "News" informs you about the latest news from our specialist areas. The reports and publications of this section are listed chronologically or according to areas of interest.

RadMarkt.de, 2013/12/04
Reading time 3:00 minutes

VSF: Panel discussion on the Stiwa pedelec test

Sometimes you expect little and get more. On the occasion of their members’ meeting the German service and bicycle cooperation (VSF) had arranged a panel discussion on the e-bike test of the German product testers (Stiftung Warentest). Those who had expected no more than an exchange of the known arguments on this November 25, 2013 in Bad Boll were pleasantly surprised. It seems that the Berlin product testers are possibly willing to move with regard to the test design and to open a genuine dialogue...

As a matter of fact the discussion also included the verbal exchange reminding the press conference given by the industry and the reply of Stiftung Warentest (RadMarkt reported on this subject). The CEO of Biketec, Kurt Schaer, of course took the opportunity to assure the big number of Flyer dealers on the spot that there was no truth in the defects on the low-step-through frames of Flyer alleged by Stiftung Warentest. Intensive tests had been conducted on their own and no modifications to the frames were made. He is of the opinion that the frame breakage was caused by a wrong clamping into the test stand, in this point he had the assistance of the tester Dirk Zedler who sarcastically remarked that the fix clamping of the rear frame was a wrong method used by Stiftung Warentest, which can normally be done by a trainee, whereas the correct movable clamping of the rear frame required a sophisticated construction which was only mastered by competent engineers.

Such kind of tricky situation is something Dr. Holger Brackemann has to go through quite often. He is responsible for these product tests at Stiftung Warentest and had accepted the invitation to take part in the controversial discussion. When he started for example defending the setup of the frame testing, in stating that all other frames had not broken, he had to get informed by Zedler that this was a weak argument from the point of view of an engineer. Theoretically, it was even thinkable that one of the successfully tested frames would fail if tested with a correct test setup. Dr. Brackemann could neither be pleased by the reproach of VSF managing director Albert Herresthal to spread test results which have proven to be false with the “presumption of infallibility” and to publish the correction then only in the small print – example disturbance of the police radio.

Author: Michael Bollschweiler 

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