The road racing bicycle is one of the few devices that consistently gets better. Better materials, like carbon fiber, and real world use over a huge range of conditions quickly winnows away bad designs. Every so often major manufacturers try to sell a pseudo-improvement, like bio-pace chainrings (pictured at right), but the market and real world experience deletes them.
The limited ability of humans to produce power, a measly fraction of a horsepower, imposes severe limits on bicycles. It ties the design to nature and immediate feedback. Tools and machines with proportionally less feedback and less limitations tend to wander off down a thousand paths.
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