I have to say I was mildly irritated with Marcus this week when he took what could have been a perfectly good Dumbest Product of the Week away from me with the $27,000 “The World’s Most Advanced Bicycle”. But rather than get mad, I’ve instead upped the ante with a $100,000 bike made of gold. Eat that, Formula 1!

The Aurumania Gold Bike Crystal Edition receives our nomination this week for sheer conspicuous consumption on the level we’ve not seen since Bernie Madoff was making record “profits” for his investors. Auramania has built a track bike with every surface covered with 24 carat gold as well as crystal along the lug lines. I know that they were trying to go for the bling factor with the crystal, but I gotta say it makes the bike more juger than Macaframa.

Much like the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, this product makes you wonder if there are any customers left for items like this in our global recession. It seems that only global criminal masterminds like those behind the great Gladiator Garage Works Claw conspiracy have the coin to make a bike like this theirs. Auramania says their name merges the latin for gold with mania to mean “pre-occupied with gold” and that their product is “only fully accessible to those in the know.” Sounds an awful lot like my favorite Bond villain:

"Do you expect me to ride without brakes on that thing, Goldfinger?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."

Auramania does try to enhance the value of this bike by saying they are limiting production to just 10 worldwide and that your purchase includes personal White Glove delivery anywhere in the world. For $100K, I want them to baby sit my children until they are in college while I ride around on this thing. I’m hoping they’ll throw in the $6000 gold bike rack for free to get me into this bike today.

Unfortunately, the Brooks B17 saddle is about all I can afford on that bike, though I did come across this 100 grand last night:

I’m just afraid that my 100 grand might leave a some brown marks on the “White Gloves.”

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

I’d like to thank one of our vigilant readers for sending me this week’s nominee, The Wind Helmet concept. The Wind Helmet is a piece of bike/motorcycle head gear that has vents in the front that shoot air to at fan in the back which powers a small generator.

This device joins previous nominee, the Biomechanical Energy Harvester, in a series of concepts to make power generation for all our various mobile devices more “green.” Never mind that the energy required to produce such a device likely dwarfs the total energy output it is every capable of making. And like other such devices, this helmet seeks to make us more dependent on all sorts of electronic devices, not less so.

Aside from the Halo-like look of these helmets, I can’t image anyone wanting to put one of these on. I mean all the paraphernalia inside is likely to weigh at least 5 pounds. Whens the last time you thought of batteries as light? Add to that the wind catching nature of the helmet, and I’d say your neck is going to get quiet a workout. You’d need two Nubrellas and an Axoim carbon rack just to counteract the aerodynamic drag created by this thing. That would get old real quick. 

It seems like if your going to put a fan in your helmet, the air ought to be going the other direction like with this pith helmet from Hammacher Schlemmer:

The energy generated by the solar panels on this helmet may not power your iPod or blackberry, but it does produce a cool breeze. On a an August day in Austin on my bike, I’d gladly trade that for all the mobile devices in the world.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

$3500 for a cycling suit? Image courtesy of Rapha.

Image courtesy of Rapha

Some of you may recall Rapha’s $750 Tweed Softshell as our 16th edition Dumbest Product winner. This softshell may be OK for slumming it with your friends on Saturdays, but Rapha doesn’t want you to resort to wearing this during the business week. Instead, they have come up with a $3500 cycling suit for the cyclists who wants to go straight from pedaling a bike to peddling toxic assets on Wall Street. First reported on BikePortand, this suit is a collaboration with fashionable British taylor  Timothy Everest and is being offered through Signature Cycles of New York as an exclusive invitation (or as exclusive as anyone with money and access to the Internet can get.)

I’m trying to figure out from the pictures what exactly makes this a cycling suit. Other than the back pockets on the jacket, the ability to roll up your sleeves seems to be the only other distinguishing feature. Nothing destroys the illusion that you have fashion sense faster than rolled up sleeves with brightly colored under stitching as the Cordorounds showed us.

Of course if you have a bike that is actually built to be ridden in street cloths, then you can just wear a regular suit. Instead, we all have to buy into the idea of speciality clothing just to throw our leg over a bike and go somewhere. If we are going to go that far, why not just get this jersey from another fine British clothing purveyor:

It’s no Timothy Everest, but at 50 bucks, it just might pass.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

We’ll be back with more fun next week. In the meantime, check out our archive of previous Dumbest Products for some golden oldies.

Thanks to Bike Hacks for alerting me to this week’s nominee for Dumbest Product of the Week, The Claw by Gladiator Garage Works. Gladiator Garage Works is maker of garage organizing products, kind of like the Container Store but more niche. Most of their stuff is incredibly manly with lots of steel and wood so you don’t have to feel feminine about organizing. 

For the bike owner, Gladiator Garage Works gives you the The Claw, a ceiling mounted, push button system that allows you to hang bikes by their wheels for storage. You use the wheel of the bike to push the internal button which opens and shuts the claw securing your bike. It’s not a bad idea until you realize that it costs $60 to do what a $3 hook from the hardware store does.

Aside from being a bit of a rip off, I felt an uneasiness I couldn’t quiet place looking at this product. This discomfort was heightened as I perused the  Gladiator Garage Works site and ran into Karl, a helpful Australian video promoter of GGW items who appears floating in the menu banner. Then it hit me. This was no normal silly product, but something more insidious. I realized The Claw is in fact a reproduction of the appendage belonging to Inspector Gadget’s nemesis, Dr. Claw.

Where did the design for 'The Claw' come from, I wonder

Now things were coming together. Gladiator Garage Works was actually a front for Dr. Claw and his evil M.A.D. criminal syndicate, using the dollars of unsuspecting cyclists and homophobic garage interior decorators to take over the world. I now fear for friendly Karl who is in no doubt seen without any identifying surroundings because he is being held prisoner by Dr. Claw’s henchmen.

Is Garage Gladiator Karl at the mercy of Dr. Claw's henchmen?

I encourage everyone to bring M.A.D. to its knees by avoiding the purchase and use dumb products everywhere until a hero surfaces to save us from this madness. Karl is counting on us.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

Axiom is back this week as our nominee for Dumbest Product of the Week with more carbon fiber madness in the form of their Kompress Air Pro Carbon floor pump. Once again, Axiom offers a perfectly fine looking aluminum version of this pump, this time for half the price. I will commend them for actually making the carbon version lighter this time, but at a scant 5 gram weight difference (1/100th of a pound for all you metric Luddites), it seems hardly worth the trouble of making. Of course, this completely ignores that fact the it is a FLOOR pump, which means you are never carrying this thing on a bike or really in any way other than across the garage. So why give a flip about weight?

Well, Axiom has got an answer. They say that the pump has “Serious ‘BLING-BLING’ factor.” Paying $150 for a pump that, let’s be honest here is going to be sitting between the garden tools and your Christmas decorations collecting dust, is more like Dumb-Dumb. I don’t think floor pumps give you street credit otherwise we’d be seeing more of this:

No, in the cycling world your only real credibility in the end comes from your legs, and no amount of carbon makes the same statement as dropping someone on a climb.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

This weeks nominee for Dumbest Product of the Week, the Axiom Streamliner Carbon rear rack, takes us to a silliness we’ve not seen since Bontrager graced us with a $250 rack capable of carrying nothing. Fortunately, the Streamliner Carbon does not fall into that level of uselessness with its marginally acceptable 55 pound weight limit. However, I think anyone who buys this is going to feel like a complete doofus when they realize they’ve paid a $167 premium over the aluminum version of this rack to which hauls twice the load. Plus, the carbon rack is actually heavier than the aluminum one! To paraphrase Meatloaf, “I’d do anything for carbon, but I won’t do that.”

Axoim: Another victim of the hypnotic siren song of carbon.

What’s also stupifyingly amusing about this product is that it is under the Axiom catagory of “rear low profile aero racks“. There are many adjectives I can come up with to describe rear racks (sturdy, useful, Fredish) but aero is not one of them. I’ve watched every minute of The Lance Chronicles, and not once did I hear Lance say, “You know what would really crush Jan Ulrich in the time trial, Johan? If we had a rear rack on my TT bike. Let’s get in the wind tunnel and test that thing!”

Wake up guys! You can’t make a bike rack cool by slapping some carbon on it. Racks, like floss and seat belts, should work well but never aspire to be cool. Attempts to do otherwise yield overpriced, under performing crap like this. Stop trying to hide the fact that racks are dorky, but useful. Embrace the Fred and know you can actually haul stuff on your bike.

All this talk of performance utility components getting me thinking about the commuter/time trial bike I designed last fall using online design program at Pedal Mafia.

Hmmm. If I could just make this in carbon, I might have something.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

This week’s nominee is the LightLane, a concept that has been making the bike blog rounds this week and attempts to address both night visibility and the lack of bicycle facilities in one product. Now I’m all for visibility. Light yourself up like a Christmas tree and get visible. I’m not sure lasers shooting on the ground is going to work in the real world, but if they did, the more lights, the better.

Perhaps you could get a Down Low Glow, a commerically available product that would do much of what this concept attempts in visibility. The only downside there is you have to choose whether you are going to be a good Jedi or a bad one.

My biggest problem with this product is its assumption as cyclists that we must accept our status as second class citizens. The creators of this concept say “only a small fraction of streets have dedicated bike lanes, and with an installation cost of $5,000 to $50,000 per mile, we shouldn’t expect to find them everywhere anytime soon.”

I think if we put the amount of energy and creativity that was dedicated to making this concept into actually getting organized and demanding equal facilities, we won’t have to resort temporary lighting to make the space on the road we deserve.

Earlier this week, former mayor of Bógota, Enrique Peñalosa, made the point at the Shifting Gears luncheon that providing such facilities is akin to respecting the dignity of all our citizens. “A protected bikeway shows a citizen on a $40 bike is as important as a person in a $40,000 car,” he said. Amen, brother. Ain’t no blinky gonna replace space for us on the road.

In the end, it’s not really this product that is dumb, but us. Americans have chosen a life that is comfortably wasteful and one that cares little for the needs of those without the green or desire to own a car. It’s OK though. Fate may favor the fools, but roll the dice enough and sooner or later you lose. Let’s just hope we make the changes we need before we roll snake eyes.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

The second category’s creators I admire for their entrepreneurial spirit and imagination in attempting to create something new in the marketplace that could benefit us all. I don’t wish to kill this spirit, but, unfortunately entrepreneurism, like we’ve seen with free markets, is not necessarily a good thing if left unchecked. This week’s nominee for Dumbest Product of the Week falls into this second lovable, if misunderstood category.

Will you see any women this attractive wearing the Nubrella? If you answer yes, I'll need photographic proof!

The Nubrella aims to provide you protection “against all weather conditions.” It is intended to conquer one of the the draw backs of the traditional umbrella, namely “the inversion problem,” when a gust of wind blows your umbrella inside out. I appreciate the attempt to fix one of the weak links of umbrella design, but this product fails to address my biggest issue with umbrellas: coverage. While I’m sure that the Numbrella is superior at protecting my head and shoulders, having dry hair isn’t that big an advantage going into a business meeting if my waist, arms, and legs are soaking wet.

Will the Nubrella provide the winning edge at this year's Tour de France?

In the Nubrella promotional materials, they show the produce being worn by a cyclists recalling a previous Dumbest Product winner, the DryBike. Not content with a quaint Dutch design attaching an umbrella to your bike, the Numbrella is the DryBike on steroids, boasting an aerodynamic design rated to 50 miles per hour. While I’m sure it does nothing to keep you dry on a bike, this wind tunnel test intrigues me and make me wonder if we’ll be seeing the Numbrella on a certain Lance Armstrong during the race of truth at the Tour this year. It can’t be any sillier looking than the sperm-like time trial helmets being worn now.

Did the Get Smart Cone of Silence inspire the creator of the Nubrella?

In the end, these attempts to keep us dry with ever increasing engineered products makes me wonder about our fortitude in these trying times. We humans have survived for millennia just walking through the rain. In know we have acid rain these days, but we aren’t made of sugar. (We may however be made of corn.) If you really want to stay dry, galoshes, a rain coat, and hat beat an umbrella any day, be it Nu or regular. We don’t need some Get Smart Cone of Silence induced solution. Just suck it up and realize in any life some rain must fall.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.

Image Courtesy of BikeSnobNYC

This weeks nominee, Cadel Evans’ Winners energy bar, surpasses previous nominee, Mike Ditka for shamelessly cashing in on minor celebrity. According to the reporting of the Australian paper, The Age, the Winners brand teamed up with Evans to create a bar with oats, cranberries, currents and peanuts. The Age reports that the manufacturer finds Evans inclusion of the nuts to be ”interesting” due to the performance enhancing benefits of revastrol in the nuts.

Hmmm, peanuts, interesting? In don’t know what qualifies for exotic in Australia, but here in the States peanuts rank up there with fructose corn syrup as a base filler in tons of foods. Not exactly the unique elixir we’ve come to expect from an energy bar industry hawking their products as health food.

Unfortunately, this is not the least of the marketing faux pas’ in this product. The whopper comes with the name “Winner” on a product with Cadel Evans in a yellow jersey. For those unfamiliar with pro bike racing, Evans is a Tour de France contender that placed SECOND in this year’s edition, his highest finish. At least Mike Ditka can actually claim to be in the NFL Hall of Fame when giving his crappy salsa the Hall of Fame moniker.

Would you by an energy bar from a guy who keeps a portrait of himself over his fireplace?

Cadel may be the real winner of the Tour in his mind, but nothing says grade A wanker like putting your likeness in a yellow jersey that you didn’t win on a product and selling it. Not wheel sucking on the defining stage of the Tour, or dropping your GC contenting teammate, or putting an enormous painting of yourself over your fireplace, or slapping a reporter, or threatening to kill someone if they touch your dog. No, this solidifies Evans as the biggest wanker in cycling history (and he has some pretty stiff competition.)

So do I want to eat an energy bar with generic ingredients packaged to promote this guy? I think I’ll keep training on bread and water, thank you.

Enjoy your weekend, and get out and ride your bike.

Read the previous week’s Dumbest Product of the Week.