This sounds like sour grapes from a bike shop guy but the way I’m seeing canyon treat customers on Warranty claims is appalling. They seem not to care at all.
Even if not from me, buy a bike from a reputable shop and make a folder with a copy of your receipt right away. The only way the big guys will 100% deny a claim is no proof of purchase.
This of course brings me to the next point. No brand (that I’m aware of) covers any claim for a second owner of a bike.
As for Gene’s comments on Niner.. I’ll dig into some history here.. we sold a LOT of bikes from Niner. At The time, a 29er was a novel concert. Most of the big brands didn’t have a Niner yet or if they did the geometry wasn’t quite there. A couple years of selling their bikes, and many frames began to fail.
Especially prone to failure were the alloy ones. It was really disappointing to see the claims come in denied again and again. We felt super betrayed as we sold these frames in good faith, but they really just wouldn’t stand behind them at all.
The unsaid here was that if they gave away all the frames that needed to be given away to cover the vast number of failures that they would likely go under.
As history tells it, the company went down the tubes pretty quickly after that and was purchased. The names (Steve and Chris maybe) of the two main guy who started the company escape me today but effectively when one of them left things got bad as they really couldn’t get along. When I saw that they started to make 27 five wheeled Niners, it became obvious that they weren’t staying in their lane.
Niner was at the right place at the right time but there’s an all things Time waits for no one. Yes, I feel burned by this company as from my perspective they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain. I’m not exactly sure how it works when you build the frames with a vendor in Asia, but it’s likely that a certain amount of failures are expected and covered. Niner obviously didn’t make anything themselves, but when the failures came in volume there for him vendor didn’t hold up Here ended the deal. This is truly speculation but my guess is that factory just said “this is what you asked us to build and it was a bad design”.
I’ll add here that my relationship with Niner ended long before the current ownership and I am not judging what they are doing these days. Although the atrocity of their modern ebike is one to behold.
Maybe they ride great..
Fast forward to today And I can tell you that I have personal relationships with the people that hold the cards in terms of warranty claim denial or approval with Santa Cruz, Pivot, Orbea, Cannondale, salsa etc. These relationships are indeed vital.
In so many cases the claims that are denied, involve a customer who has gone around the bike shop and called the company directly making a tremendous fuss. This is almost always a situation where you collect more flies with honey. (See rule #1j
Although I no longer deal with Seven CYCLES, I have a single customer who I think has broken sixth of their frames. He’s on here on the regular and I’m sure he’s reading this now. It seems that titanium might not be invincible, especially paired with off-road riding on a full rigid bike. But I do give seven credit as they obviously lost money on each one of these frames.
The elephant in the room is always the same, a certain number of bikes are always gonna fail from every builder of every design. There is no bike design that is never failed that I’m aware of.
Some level of responsibility is held by the owner to fully disassemble clean and inspect every bike every single year.
I’m sure Jim will echo this, but many times when we do full overhauls of Bicycles, we find find cracks on frames that the owners don’t know have failed.
In the age of the Internet and instantaneous communication, if a frame manufacturer has a reputation for mass failures, it’s really hard to shake it. Some brands have taken tremendous hits by replacing nearly every frame of certain designs.
Take a second to actually read the fine print of your warranty before you buy a bike. Know and understand what you’re buying.
