Unnecessary cycling innovations?

At this time each year, we see the launch of the following year's cycling equipment - sometimes (all too rarely in my opinion) a hugely significant technical advance is made.  Shimano's development of STI shifters for road bikes, which seemed to stimulate parallel development at Campagnolo, is one of these cases.  Addition of more gears does not.  For example, cyclingnews.com has an article outlining the changes to Campagnolo's lineup for 2009, with the addition of an 11th cog to the cassette in the top three groupsets, among other things.

I have had absolutely no experience with SRAM equipment, so I have no worthwhile opinions on that.  The kit looks good, has had good reviews, and it is good to see a third player in the field. 

Good innovations

Just to show I'm no luddite, harking back to some imaginary golden world of cycling, here are some innovations I think have been worthwhile, and that I like! 

STI levers (and Ergo levers) - now, I happen to prefer the operation and shape of Campagnolo's Ergolevers over Shimano's STI, but the effect of combining gearshifters with brake levers has been enormous.

Ultratorque chainsets (and other outboard bearing systems, pioneered by Shimano) - again, Shimano led the way here.  Unfortunately, I dislike the look of the current crop of Shimano chainsets (yes, call me shallow), and haven't got hands-on experience of them, though I hear only good things.  I have fitted Campagnolo's UT chainsets to a couple of bikes, and can say they are the easiest chainsets I've ever fitted.  The "Q factor" seems small, and the stiffness of the setup is excellent.  This is despite the expectation that a bottom bracket axle that is split in two sections, and joined by a Hirth coupling might lead to problems.

Bad innovations

Tubeless tyres  Mountain bikers have had tubeless tyres for a few years now - the advantages seem to be running at lower pressures for increased traction, without risking impact punctures.  However for road use, I still believe that tubeless tyres are a solution in desperate need for a problem.  I have never had an impact puncture in all my years of cycling; as far as I can see from the Hutchinson web page (Hutchinson are the only manufacturers of tubeless road tyre I know of) they run at a max of about 108psi; the tyres themselves are heavy, the rims are heavy.  To cap it all, it appears that to repair a puncture out on the road not only requires the use of a tube, but removing and refitting the tyre is tough.  One can apparently use tubeless tyres on regular road rims - see this video, for example.

Yet more gears  I suppose this is the luddite in me coming out, but I don't see an advantage in moving from 10-speed to 11-speed as Campagnolo are doing for 2009.  Mind you, I said the same for each increase in gears since 7 speed, so perhaps the benefits will be obvious in use... All my racing is time trialling, so I probably use at most four gears in a typical race.  Three of my bikes are on 9 speed, and I've not so far moved to 10 speed.  I guess moving on to 11 speed is pretty unlikely in the near future!

Electric gear shifting   Mavic tried this twice in recent years (Zap, then a few years later Mektronic).  One iteration was very susceptible to getting wet, and as far as I could tell the successor system, which worked quite well suffered because of that reputation.  I believe Chris Boardman used them, at least on his time trial bike because of the multiple positions of the shift buttons.  But for soemone like me who prefers systems that are fixable on the road, an electronic system presents some problems. It's interesting to note that websites have reported on appearances of prototype electronic shifting systems from Campagnolo (see for example this page at cyclingnews.com) over the past few years, but that they haven't made it to the market thus far. Just to show Shimano are working along the same lines, here's a page from cyclingnews.com describing the Dura-Ace Di2 system.

I may well add further examples...