Holy ol' fuck, are people nowadays accepting battery powered derailleurs as normal? That's absurd.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Not only battery-operated, but also with wireless communication that can be hacked.
https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot24/presentation/motallebighomi
I'm usually security inclined when it comes to gadgets but on a bicycle drivetrain I don't see the point. There's nothing to gain by hacking someone's shifter. What I think is mad is separate batteries for tiny bike components. If it's an ebike and the components are driven by the main traction battery, it might be sensible.
Unless it's a competitive race, then something fucking with your drivetrain could seriously mess you up. Or someone just doing it for their own twisted fun could be incredibly annoying.
There kind of is a point: It's also totally not normal to somehow have a wire going from your handlebars through your frame to your back wheel where you are janking the gears in place. Motors are cheap and reliable, batteries are also cheap and why not use a wireless connection to get rid of the pesky wires? The idea is great, but what Shimano is doing with it not so
Nah, four batteries just to change gear on a 2x drive train is cuckoobabanas.
Getting rid of the cable is great but having to babysit a tiny battery without which you have no shifting at all is insane to me.
I actually just had to go back to my house wanting to go to ride on a beautiful sunny day because didn't realized the front derailleur battery was knocked out.
I don't think it's the end of the world, though. After a lifetime of riding crappy bikes there are much more serious and dangerous stuff to be worried about.
I definitely wouldn't describe it as baby sitting. For me it is every 1000km or so for my SRAM rear derailleur, or about 1500km for my Shimano di2.
So it is around once a month if I am riding that bike.
In terms of reliability, it has been significantly better than cable, never had a a failure with electronic shifting. Have had campagnolo eat my shifter cable twice, leaving me around 80km from home with no rear shifting. And a huge pain in the ass to get all the cable out.
Edit - oh and batteries for the shifters, last year's.
How heavy and expensive are the batteries? If it was easy enough to carry a spare of each type, I could see the point.
I can't leave the battery in my power meter through the winter, because it freezes and explodes.
With these, I assume you now have 4 damn batteries running out at different times that need replacing. Are they rechargeable at least?
The only non rechargeable ones are the coin batteries in the shifters, and after over 2 years and more than 30,000km on that bike, I still don't need to think about changing them.
The rechargeable batteries are simple, much simpler than things like my lights or my headphones, watch, phone, every other item that you have to charge constantly, because they last so long. My Garmin also tells me when it is getting low on charge(and that's still enough to comfortably ride for 200km+)
Couple that with how much better and consistent the shifting is, you never have to touch it again, no cable wear or changing the cables, never have to deal with bad shifting, I will never go back to mechanical shifting.
TLDR; they resurrected the "rapid rise" derailleur and paired it with a non-indexed shifter. What's old is new again.
And charging >$100 for it. To each their own...