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genuine question; how are they getting away with selling a bike thats £4/5k with bad quality and getting away with it? I am on Tern GSD Facebook group and people hardly ever complain there. I have never heard complaints from actual users.
amey-
If you go back to 2018/2019 you might start seeing some, but hopefully things have gotten better.
Full disclosure; I haven't laid hands on one in about two years, but I built maybe 18-20 GSDs myself during the first two production years and they were rife with QC issues .
The most common issues were:
- Crooked post mounts on the frame and/or fork that were bad enough that facing did little to nothing to fix them half the time.
- Rear brake hose and shift housing being crushed during the factory installation of the drive unit
- The dust cap of the rear hub slowly unthreading itself during riding, throwing off the indexing of the shifting and eventually seizing the freehub body altogether.
- The alignment of the rear end being so bad that the largest cassette cog had to be locked out because the derailleur cage would contact the tire and eventually rub through the sidewall.
- The rubber tensioner pulley for the chain deforming enough that the cartridge bearings just fall out.
- A laughable number of spontaneous kickstand failures.
- The taper of the frame and rear thru axle insert not matching up perfectly resulting in the thru axle entering the threaded side at an angle instead of straight-on.
My shop at the time was very cargo-focused and there was so much hype leading up the release of the GSD that it made the horribleness of those QC issues sting that much more and given that we'd presold dozens, it really fucked our service queue. Add to this that for the better part of the first year, Tern denied that these issues were even real despite us submitting photographic evidence and getting replacement parts like forks was like pulling teeth. They also told us and other dealers things like "it's normal for disc brakes to rub for the first couple hundred miles) and tried to gaslight us by saying they hadn't heard of any other dealers having the problems we were seeing (which turned out to be complete BS.)
I was eventually put in charge of tracking, cataloging and managing the QC warranty complaints for the shop. By the time I left Christmas of 2019, it showed that just over half the GSDs we built (80+ total) had one or more of the above QC issues.
The whole ordeal just really soured the company for me forever.
- Crooked post mounts on the frame and/or fork that were bad enough that facing did little to nothing to fix them half the time.
JVBulman
Assuming the bike lasts that long.
If you like the 20" midtail model, R&M will be dropping something to compete directly with the GSD mid 2022, but you didn't hear it from me.