You are reading a single comment by @Yemble and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
-
Probs a different (narrower) chain though so software would have to know that, plus swapping the jockey wheels. When there are only two mainstream manufacturers in the industry, what's in it for them?
Yemble-
Yeah - and chainrings perhaps. You could design it so that you just buy a new cage (a few quid if we're optimistic?) and jockey wheels.
But yes, nothing in it for them; in fact they're way better off if you have to buy a whole new groupset for every bike that you want to switch from 10- to 11-speed. It would be really nice for gravel/CX/touring/commuter stuff to have electronic MTB/road mashup groupsets but I guess that's not a big enough market
frankenbike
I don't really want to get into it but from an electronics perspective it would be very easy to design a system of electronic shifters and derailleurs that would work with any number of speeds (up to the precision of your little servos) within some left-right/up-down range (i.e. the cassette would have some maximum width - at least 40mm if you want to do current 11-speed - and a maximum sprocket size - let's say design it to take up to a 50t). Then you just need to tell it the sprocket pitch and the number of speeds and you can put whatever cassette you like on there (assuming that you have a long enough cage). If 13-speed comes out in 5 years with this system you'd just need to get a new cassette and chain and reprogram everything for it to work (as long as it's less wide than the range of your derailleur).
This is not currently possible; i.e. there are only certain combinations of shifters, derailleurs and cassettes between road, MTB, 10/11-speed that work, and so you can't mix and match bits to get the exact setup that you want.
If you ask me Shimano/SRAM probably could allow this right now and perhaps will at some point in the future. If not maybe some computer wizard will write some software to get it to work one day. Or some other company will do it.