Di2 longevity

mfin

meanredspider wrote:

mfin wrote:

Exactly. There's hardly going to be many responses, and there haven't been, so there's absolutely no conclusions that can be drawn and never will be. At best, you're better off searching on google for failures on a specific make and model.

Nobody has even highlighted regularly occurring issues with particular models. A few people saying that they've had absolutely no problem means nothing at all, and I am not saying there's significant issues either.

You’re confusing in-service reliability with what the OP really wants: longevity. With longevity, every bit of data is of use. If, like me, you have an early Ultegra Di2 that’s been running almost 7 years, you know that the system can run for 7 years (ie that there are no components in that system that have a finite life of less than 7 years). That has NOTHING to do with statistics - it’s just a fact. Every other bit of data from the 10 or so people that have posted add to that picture and that’s where it becomes a bit more “statistical” - though, with reliability, Weibull distribution rules and that’s not even “proper” stats. In fact our biggest problem here is that we don’t really have anybody that has had a component “wear out” (the right hand end of the bathtub).

There’s no doubt that a few people have early life failures - especially batteries - but those components will be covered by warranty/consumer rights. Others (fewer than I’d expected) have had accidental failures from crashes and the like. There aren’t many people that have had anything wear out which I believe is the OP’s question. My systems are 7 years, 4 years and 2 years old (all Ultegra of the current spec when they were bought) none of which has worn out (no in-service issues either just FYI).

On another point on spares. I can still buy batteries for my oldest systems. If an RD or FD fails, I DON’T need to change the entire groupset (as suggested earlier in the thread) but I will need to convert to 11sp (I have a converter for my Volagi wheel) - but the shifters and the battery don’t need changing. That said, my entire system has taken far more abuse than most road bikes will ever see over those 7 years.

It's not really possible to buy a new 7 year old groupset though is it.

If he'd asked, out of the current electronic groupsets which ones have previous versions that you can't buy anymore that were reliable then it is of course completely relevant.

Your last para makes sense though, people might not have thought of that.

dodgy

Yes, I had researched the various workarounds to having my (then) 2.5 year old RD failing:

New wheelset (or at the very least, new rear wheel)
New cassette / chain (and complications of running 11spd chain on my chainset)
Hacking the shifters to kid them into 11 speed (or at least there's some work you have to do here?)
New 11 speed RD

Basically it's all a right faff, would be made a lot easier if spares had been made available for a more reasonable time after production.

964cup

I'll add here that my experience of Di2 is also that the individual components are pretty tough, and are repairable. In another thread you'll read that I managed to pull my Di2 rear mech into the spokes of my rear wheel, snapping my rear dropout in the process. This mech had also hit the deck at least once before. The fancy carbon o/s pulley wheel cage was toast, as were the limit screws, b-screw and hanger pivot, but £70 of used mechanical DA9000 rear mech and half an hour of spanner time had it fully rebuilt as a standard RD9070. (Yes, yes, I could have refitted the original cage, but I'd sold that on ages ago, obviously. And anyway, I needed the other bits.)

Ernesider

My Di2 battery (19 months old) stopped holding charge as it should, about 3 or 4 days at the end. Sent back to Start Fitness who returned it to Madison who said it was working perfectly and sent it back to Start Fitness, who to put it kindly lack the expertise to test it themselves and are in the process of sending it back with a lot of (to my mind) useless advice as to other possible causes of the discharging battery. I changed a battery from another bike and did about 2 hundred miles without any major loss of charge. I think this conclusively proves my point, that it is not some other problem, it is the f***ing battery, but the aforementioned experts refuse to accept the obvious.. !!