The gimmick is simple. If I’m Garmin I take a standard GPS device, pivot once and market it as a mountain bike accessory. If I’m a company that delivers primarily “urban bicycle IoT,” I simply plonk a sticker on the back of a box and say it works for your mountain bike riding experience too. But, did anyone bother to check?
Garmin zones in wearing a GPS crown and the commoners bow before that lineage. The same thing happened when Brembo bought out some funky red mountain bike glamor wear with the catchy brake line: “Dominate Gravity. ”
Can you see the chasm that established brands fall into? Is their gig is more of a sales gimmick than a product upgrade? Yes, we do brakes that stop you pitching your Moto GP bike into a gravel trap. But, what if the massive bite of a Brembo is not the best tool for a downhill run into some prickly thorn bushes? Who would know outside the cozy collaborative confines of a top tier London marketing agency?
Garmin’s cycling computers are principally rider-facing navigation and performance devices. That doesn’t automatically make them the competition for a concealed, serviceable, impact-resistant asset tracker or telemetry tool. Let’s admit that weather protection, movement alerts, location recovery, compact mounting and low-power operation are already covered bases. If you port across the best bits of your personal mountain trackers and find a decent bike mounting rig, half the job is done.
MTB users are a different breed
Have leading products have been tested against MTB-specific shock and vibration profiles? Can their mounts withstand repeated impacts; and remain reliable after sustained exposure to mud, washing and temperature cycling? My Garmin e-Trex (1999 -) might be biblically ancient, but it was always treated as a piece of important navigation equipment. Babied, wrapped and coddled, as a safety item of consequence on rugged, wet, hillsides. MTB users are a different breed, they’re vibrating that thing like a drugged up 90s rave.
One particularly revealing clue…
Mountain-bike owners are already improvising their own solutions. In MTB discussions, riders describe hiding AirTags in frame cavities, under bottle cages and around components. Others discuss the limitations of Bluetooth tracking and the difficulty of concealing a device securely.
That tells us there is something specific that people are trying to solve. It doesn’t yet tell us how many teenagers would pay for a better solution.
One working conclusion: The opportunity is unlikely to be “a more waterproof bicycle tracker, or ABS for MTB.” It may be “a tracker engineered and validated for the physical abuse of off-road use, with installation and servicing designed around the bike and mountain biking culture. In the same way that skaters, surfers and ski people all tweak their preferences to suit their specific environments.
