Saratoga Dave
Well-Known Member
Grab a beer and put your feet up, this is a long one!
Alright, so now I’m a little hot under the collar, and in my usual way, I have dealt with it by voting with my feet. No particular reflection on my bike, a Trek XM700+ that I have now put just over 6200 miles on, but some degree of annoyance with Bosch and huge irritation with the LBS I bought it from. Here goes:
So over the past year I have been afflicted four times - it might be five, but I am certain of four - with the dreaded Bosch “Sorry, not today” issue: Turning on the bike and clicking up into the boost levels results in a flicker of the Eco setting and right back to Off. There it stays. Bike will not go. This has happened on random starts out of the garage, once after stopping along a ride to remove and put some extra charge on the battery, and another time on stopping at a store and coming out to the bike not willing to fire up again.
This was the second time I took it back to the original Trek dealer I bought it from… once I got it going myself the next day as it was home and just started up OK, once I had to have another Trek dealer work on it since it broke down near their shop on a ride. The story has always been some variety of dirt in the contacts, whether in the handlebar selector or the bottom of the battery itself. This most recent time I used some handy wipes that I carry for this purpose to wipe down everything I could find - none of which were dirty in the first place - and it still didn’t go. My wife had to drive out and rescue me.
OK, so six days at the bike shop and I get the call the bike is ready. I ask what was replaced or found to be the issue, and the guy says they replaced the cracked piece of plastic that you press on to select the boost. Nothing was done at all to seek out the actual underlying cause, after I had expressly complained about not being able to trust this bike as it nears the end of the two year warranty. I was not pleased.
And then the guy - a shop mechanic, not the owner - makes an interesting statement concerning the battery key. I had asked them to charge the battery for me since I figured I would pick it up and go out for a 30 mile or so ride. He said the key I had given him was not a Bosch or Trek key, but an Abus key and he has never seen that on any Trek bike.
Curiouser and curiouser! When I bought this bike - represented as new - it had 27 miles on it which I figured was test riding or demoing at the shop. I didn’t bitch about it at the time, but now my suspicious nature tells me this freaking guy sold me a used bike that had been rekeyed for some reason - presumably to match an owner’s lock - and returned. So now I am truly and deeply disgusted.
Not at the bike itself, certainly not at Trek. Loved the bike when I could trust it, but I am preparing to do the whole Erie Canal trip again this spring and I have to know the bike is not going to leave me.
I will be calling Trek direct in the next few days to make enough noise to get someone to FIX the thing before I sell it… I couldn’t do so as it is, and stick someone else with a suspect bike.
But in the meantime, enough already. I got NO patience for this crap. I’ve learned in the past two years that I am most attracted to the trekking aspect of ebiking, and to more of the rougher, gravel environment. We have a sensational Giant dealer LBS here that I have wanted to support anyway, so I just returned from that shop having completed the order of a new Giant Toughroad GX-E+. I bought the 2018 version - there are still six left in the warehouse, they tell me - for a nicely reduced price, between it’s $175 lower retail and a year end discount.
So while I had a generally happy Trek career - and an eJoe for 1400 miles prior to that - it’s over to the Giant camp now for the next many thousand miles, and I’m looking forward to something new. The Trek will be properly corrected somewhere other than this outfit I bought it from and go to a new home where I am sure it will continue to perform, but I will be out playing with the Toughroad and getting used to drop bars again - like my trusty old Cannondale touring bike!
I was seriously interested in the new Yamaha Wabash, but the three nearest dealers to the New York Capital region are 128, 220 and 260 miles away. Not so much, and again I really, really like and respect the people at the shop I am going with. Plus, there are plenty of Giant dealers along the Erie Canal, the GAP trail region, the Virginia Capital Trail… you get the idea.
Alright, so now I’m a little hot under the collar, and in my usual way, I have dealt with it by voting with my feet. No particular reflection on my bike, a Trek XM700+ that I have now put just over 6200 miles on, but some degree of annoyance with Bosch and huge irritation with the LBS I bought it from. Here goes:
So over the past year I have been afflicted four times - it might be five, but I am certain of four - with the dreaded Bosch “Sorry, not today” issue: Turning on the bike and clicking up into the boost levels results in a flicker of the Eco setting and right back to Off. There it stays. Bike will not go. This has happened on random starts out of the garage, once after stopping along a ride to remove and put some extra charge on the battery, and another time on stopping at a store and coming out to the bike not willing to fire up again.
This was the second time I took it back to the original Trek dealer I bought it from… once I got it going myself the next day as it was home and just started up OK, once I had to have another Trek dealer work on it since it broke down near their shop on a ride. The story has always been some variety of dirt in the contacts, whether in the handlebar selector or the bottom of the battery itself. This most recent time I used some handy wipes that I carry for this purpose to wipe down everything I could find - none of which were dirty in the first place - and it still didn’t go. My wife had to drive out and rescue me.
OK, so six days at the bike shop and I get the call the bike is ready. I ask what was replaced or found to be the issue, and the guy says they replaced the cracked piece of plastic that you press on to select the boost. Nothing was done at all to seek out the actual underlying cause, after I had expressly complained about not being able to trust this bike as it nears the end of the two year warranty. I was not pleased.
And then the guy - a shop mechanic, not the owner - makes an interesting statement concerning the battery key. I had asked them to charge the battery for me since I figured I would pick it up and go out for a 30 mile or so ride. He said the key I had given him was not a Bosch or Trek key, but an Abus key and he has never seen that on any Trek bike.
Curiouser and curiouser! When I bought this bike - represented as new - it had 27 miles on it which I figured was test riding or demoing at the shop. I didn’t bitch about it at the time, but now my suspicious nature tells me this freaking guy sold me a used bike that had been rekeyed for some reason - presumably to match an owner’s lock - and returned. So now I am truly and deeply disgusted.
Not at the bike itself, certainly not at Trek. Loved the bike when I could trust it, but I am preparing to do the whole Erie Canal trip again this spring and I have to know the bike is not going to leave me.
I will be calling Trek direct in the next few days to make enough noise to get someone to FIX the thing before I sell it… I couldn’t do so as it is, and stick someone else with a suspect bike.
But in the meantime, enough already. I got NO patience for this crap. I’ve learned in the past two years that I am most attracted to the trekking aspect of ebiking, and to more of the rougher, gravel environment. We have a sensational Giant dealer LBS here that I have wanted to support anyway, so I just returned from that shop having completed the order of a new Giant Toughroad GX-E+. I bought the 2018 version - there are still six left in the warehouse, they tell me - for a nicely reduced price, between it’s $175 lower retail and a year end discount.
So while I had a generally happy Trek career - and an eJoe for 1400 miles prior to that - it’s over to the Giant camp now for the next many thousand miles, and I’m looking forward to something new. The Trek will be properly corrected somewhere other than this outfit I bought it from and go to a new home where I am sure it will continue to perform, but I will be out playing with the Toughroad and getting used to drop bars again - like my trusty old Cannondale touring bike!
I was seriously interested in the new Yamaha Wabash, but the three nearest dealers to the New York Capital region are 128, 220 and 260 miles away. Not so much, and again I really, really like and respect the people at the shop I am going with. Plus, there are plenty of Giant dealers along the Erie Canal, the GAP trail region, the Virginia Capital Trail… you get the idea.
