JWestland: This is kind of a pointless discussion for anglophones to have, because we buy so few bikes, we have zero influence on the course of what bike manufacturers build, unless we luck upon some small maker (like Thorn) who happens to share our own predilections.
But I'll offer a couple of observations all the same.
Shimano's full auto Di2 Smover/Cyber Nexus full auto group, with electronic adaptive front and rear suspension, (of which the Dura-Ace Di2 is a crippled travesty), came in hub gear and derailleur flavours, and was announced by the boss of Koga-Miyata, a trendsetting prestige division of Gazelle, largest European bike makers, to be "the future of cycling". The very sophisticated Dutch, who cycle as naturally as breathing, bought it only in small numbers, and then not the full set either. They just didn't see the need. The Germans, who don't mind spending for luxuries with engineering provenance, bought a few. Last time I looked, Gazelle listed one top of the range comfort bike, the Saphir, with the automatic gears, and none of the other bits. If Gazelle can't make a go of it in The Netherlands... Forgeddaboutit.
Trek Benelux also tried. But they went wrong from the beginning, starting with a sporting mountain bike frame, and making everything short so that the rider crouched in a sporting position. I tried the saddle they chose for all of ten feet before chucking it off as an instrument of torture. Then I reengineered their bike (with their enthusiastic help -- Trek is a wonderful bike maker to deal with, a dream) to turn it into a comfortable upright lazy day bike. It turned out to be atrociously fast on my downhills, actually, because Shimano also made a marketing mistake with the adaptive suspension, making it compliant and soft but directionally stable at speed, but stiff to conserve energy at low speed, so that it rode like a rock at the sort of speeds senior citizens who buy auto boxes are likely to attain. I could tell before their bike was fully out of the box that the Trek would have zero market, because there was a clear confusion or lack of communication between their technical and marketing departments.
Trek tried again, in the States, with a three-speed automatic, also from Shimano, on a crank-forward, feet flat on the ground, shopper and pavement bike. It came in a nice lime green. Maybe it was called the Lime. Maybe someone knows how it sold, but I thought that was better aimed at the market for automatics than my Cyber Nexus. (Don't get me wrong. I loved my Cyber Nexus Trek once I fixed it up, but I loved it as a technofreak; as a sometime boy genius of advertising and marketing, I found the whole concept strangely confused for a first class marketing company like Trek.)
There is in addition the NuVinci CVT stepless gearbox which for practical purposes is as good as an automatic, and with fewer bits than can go wrong. It is offered by some upmarket German semi-custom bike makers like Utopia at the same price as an 8-speed Alfine setup. The NuVinci has a small but growing market segment. Unlike the Rohloff (which was designed as a mud plugging mountain bikers' gearbox), the NuVinci doesn't have any sporting pretensions. It suffers a weight penalty, so don't expect to see it on too many Thorns.
So, what we see is misdirected effort (in my opinion) across the band of automatic gearboxes for bikes.
Again, in my opinion, and after riding the full auto Cyber Nexus for a couple of years as my daily bike, that was by far the most efficient bike I ever owned, including the Rohloff-equipped Utopia Kranich that is my present daily bike. It is ludicrous for roadies to believe they change more optimally than the electronics can. I think that a full auto racing bike would be worth a few fractions of a second at every gear change, and the gubbins wouldn't have to be stupid-light to make that add up to a victory over any appreciable distance, say a stage in the Tour de France. On something as long as the PBP, it could add up to minutes, rather than seconds, or to finishing rather than wiping yourself halfway.
Now you'll have to excuse me as I've remembered the other Paris-Brest, the choux pastry filled with chocolate flavoured cream invented in 1891 to celebrate the PBP...
Andre Jute
