Few things in mountain biking are as soul-crushing as when you feel your rim take a wallop. The ping reverberates through your limbs, and then there’s the secondary assault on your ears when an aluminium rim makes contact with a rock. Or that dead thud and crunch of a carbon rim receiving a pile driver from a square edge.
Regardless of what they’re made from, good wheels aren’t cheap. With the ever-increasing price of everything, forgetting to pump up your tires on the way out of the shed could make for a VERY expensive afternoon.
But the winds of change are a-blowin’, and several brands are offering whoopsie coverage for mistakes you make, in addition to guarantees to replace anything with a manufacturing defect — sometimes with the words no-questions-asked and lifetime in big, bold, black and white print.
But how can this be? Wheels blow up a lot less than they used, but there has to be some questions asked, right? Or some fine print and a catch somewhere?
We put it to some of the brands offering these no questions asked crash replacements, like Reserve, ENVE, Bontrager, and We Are One to find out.
It all started with a fellow from Scotland
The first glimpse we saw of Reserve’s carbon wheels was in the mega-popular Wee Day Out video, where Danny MacAskill showed us what he gets up to on his days off.
Mounted in his Santa Cruz 5010, the unbranded black wheels were notably missing the ENVE decals we were used to seeing between his stays, and for the eagle-eyed viewers, if you paused the video at just the right time, the trademark square spoke reinforcements are clear as day.
About a year later, Santa Cruz would share these hoops with the world, making big claims about durability. While the rolling stock was the main story, the warranty card that came in the box was just as big of news.
The short and sweet warranty did not include the words Manufacturer or Defect, and laid out that if you broke your wheels out riding, they would replace them for free, and, we’re quoting here, “probably give you a high five in the process.” Since then, that coverage has been extended across its alloy wheels and tubeless valves too.
If nothing else, it’s brilliant marketing. If you have the choice between two wheelsets that cost in excess of several week’s pay, the one backed by free-of-charge crash replacements is pretty darn attractive.
And according to Joel Smith, Reserve Wheels Brand Leader, the lifetime coverage is as simple as it sounds.
“We don’t do much questioning on crash replacement. If the rider is the original owner and the rim is damaged, we provide crash replacement support,” he tells Flow.
While Reserve was the first to put in lights that it was offering replacements for broken rims, a bit of fine print in ENVE’s five-year warranty outlined coverage for crash damage. This was at a time when brands typically backed wheels with one or two years of coverage against mistakes made on their end.
“(A) Little known fact is that our 5-year warranty covered ride damage. We replaced broken rims under “warranty.” As time went on, we realised that the purpose of a warranty was being misrepresented. Warranty protection exists to protect consumers from faulty materials and workmanship from the manufacturer, not poor judgement or usage from the consumer,” says Jake Pantone, ENVE’s VP of Product and Brand.
Just like with the warranty on a car, that doesn’t cover you rear-ending someone in traffic. So as Pantone notes in the same vein, if you smash a wheel on a sharp rock, that’s not ENVE’s fault. So in 2019, they decoupled the coverage from ‘we screwed up’ and the ‘customer screwed up’ by implementing the Incidental Damage Protection.
“So, we simply carved out this “incident protection” from our warranty. Basically a statement from ENVE to our customers saying, “We promise to make the highest performance product we possibly can, and if we screw up, the warranty will cover it. If you screw up, we want to keep you rolling on your favourite wheels, so here’s this incident protection program where we will replace your broken product to keep you in the ENVE family for life.” Lifetime being defined as the lifetime of the product, not the owner of the product. So, as long as you were the original owner, we’d replace your broken wheels,” he says.
Wheel brands covering your mistakes
This came at a time when a standard lifetime warranty was out of the ordinary. Since then, a number of brands have jumped on board, from the big players like Crankbrothers, which offers lifetime crash replacements on its Synthesis hoops, and Roval, Zipp and Bontrager offering free crash replacements for two years and heavily discounted rates thereafter. Others like DT Swiss offer coverage for manufacturer defects with an ‘unlimited replacement guarantee’, and will replace crash-damaged carbon wheels for CHF 249 / EUR 249 / USD 249 — bar the carbon TT disc wheel, which will cost you a bit more, but we’d doubt you’ll be popping that one on a mountain bike any time soon.
However, a surprising number of smaller outfits like Nobl, We Are One, and Revel offers lifetime crash replacements.
For We Are One in particular, when the brand launched in 2017, they offered crash replacements for five years to the original owner and heavily discounted wheels afterwards. But by 2019, the brand came out swinging and extended that initial coverage to lifetime.
“We made the change from a limited “no questions” warranty to a Lifetime Guarantee due to the small amount of claims that came through as a warranty claim. We stand by our product as long as it is being put to use in its intended fashion. We know our products are strong and durable and will outlast most riders! We design, engineer and hand make them all in-house, so it’s easy for us to stand behind them as we have complete control over our process,” says Nate Schumacher, Brand Manager at We Are One.
Of course, there are limits. For example, We Are One and Zipp don’t cover damage outside of riding your bike, so if you drive into the garage with bikes on the roof, that’s going to cost you — fortunately, both offer reduced-cost repair or replacement options.
For a brand like Bontrager that does aftermarket wheels and a gazillion OEM wheelsets spec’d in bikes purchased off the floor, it believes there is a balance between backing mistakes on their part and you doing something silly.
“The two main factors here are 1.) Wheels are expensive! They’re often times the largest investment outside of the frame. 2.) We’re all riders deep down and understand sometimes sh*t happens—you zig when you should have zagged, a mysterious pothole emerges, or you follow someone’s bad line—whatever it is, it sucks when something bad happens, especially when it’s a high dollar item. So we want to ease the pressure, and let our customers worry less when they are riding and focus on having fun,” says Bontrager’s Nick Anger.
“We believe this is a balance. We think a two year no questions asked replacement of all Bontrager carbon wheels is a great benefit to the end user,” he continues.
ENVE ‘s Incidental Damage Protection follows a similar modus operandi. According to Pantone, the brand’s internal data shows most of its customers keep a wheelset for two or three years before moving on to something else.
“We’ve also seen that if a customer is, “on the wrong wheel” or using it beyond the scope of design, this will manifest in the first year of riding most of the time. So, if you’ve made it three years without breaking a wheel, chances are you won’t break it in the years beyond. We still see people riding wheels we produced back in 2007 (when the brand was still called Edge Composites),” he says.
“It got to the point where customers were expecting you to replace wheels for free as if they were entitled to such. Reality is that we’re a business, we strive to make the highest performance products possible. Highest performance does not equate to indestructible. Indestructible products are rarely, if ever, the highest performance,” Pantone continues.
Just riding along is now covered by warrenty
No brand we spoke to had exact numbers on hand as to how many warranty claims they receive annually, though their ballparks were all in the low single digits. They do get some pretty wild stories about how folks were just riding along, and their wheel exploded — literally.
“We’ve had a claim where the customer was like… “I was just riding along…” as their story, and when we opened the photo, it was an absolutely detonated rim! Like did they ride over a stick of dynamite,” laughs Schumacher.
Smith tells Flow that he’s always surprised to see how many claims come from damage by animals.
“Birds who have pecked through rims, pet rats that have eaten through a tire and into the rim, dogs that have knocked bikes off racks….it’s pretty funny reading the emails explaining what happened,” he says.
However, within that, there are also some folks who see these generous crash replacement plans as a pass for free wheels in perpetuity and try to pull a fast one. According to Pantone, this is part of what inspired the update to its Incidental Damage Protection.
“Refining the program as discussed above helps remove bad actors who were simply taking advantage of us. There weren’t/aren’t many, but we’ve seen it all, and we know what a wheel smashed by a hammer looks like vs. hit a pothole. Especially if it’s at four years and 11 months…or the day after we launch a new replacement wheel model,” says Pantone.
Even for the brands that don’t sunset their free-of-charge replacements, both We are One and Reserve said there are a few outliers, but on the whole, riders use these programs as intended.
“We do ask a few questions but not to challenge the warranty in general. We require proof of purchase, and that weeds out a lot of the people taking advantage of the program. Lots of folks are honest, but you have some who try to abuse the system. We’re pretty good at determining if someone is pulling a fast one or if they have a legitimate claim,” says Schumacher.
A holistic approach to keeping customers happy
Of course, at the end of the day, all of these companies are in the business of selling gear to mountain bikers. And you would think that offering to replace wheels that cost thousands of dollars might be a hard sell to the accounting department responsible for keeping the books in order. Smith from Reserve had a slightly different take.
“The folks who are responsible for the bottom line dislike aggravating our customers and not supporting our brand promise,” he says.
I can tell you that it does make sense to provide this level of customer support if your mindset is that the reason that people buy a Reserve wheelset in the first place is because you know that the company behind it is so confident in them that they provide lifetime support. ” he continues.
Pantone offered a similar sentiment.
“We don’t launch a product expecting to see a lot of them come back. It is extremely rare to see a broken handlebar, stem, fork, or seatpost,” he says. “Wheels there is a lot more going on, but even then it’s a very low number in comparison to the total number of wheels on the road and trails. The short of it is that this type of program, executed in full transparency to the customer, is good business. A “lifetime” warranty, with loopholes and stipulations, is generally a negative experience for people.”
Outside of wheels, this type of coverage isn’t as wide spread. Race Face offers crash replacement on its new ERA crankset, and ENVE backs its parts and accessories with the same incident protection coverage. While some brands will offer repair support for frames or discounts, like We Are One and ENVE, we’re not aware of any that will sling you a new bike if you snap it coming up short on a jump or crashing into a tree.
“We see a small amount of warranties come through for the Arrival (frame) and Da Package (bar and stem). We tend to take those on case by case, with usually it being a manufacturing defect or 50% crash replacement on Da Package. With the Arrival, we have the luxury of being able to get most frames back up to 100% in-house with a minor cost rather than a full new frame cost. All that being said, it is not something we have had to utilise often, so it is also taken on a case-by-case basis,” says Schumacher.
If nothing else, all of this is quite a statement on how far carbon wheels have come in recent years. Broken wheels used to be a relatively common occurrence. The fact that so many brands, both big and small, are so confident in the durability of their plastic fantastic hoops, that they’re willing to front the cost to replace your rolling stock if you do something stupid or get unlucky, in addition to covering their own mistakes for any period is a massive step.