I work in an IBD and I have seen bikes recently from JJB sports which were manufacturered inside the new EN standard but do not meet it!

I've reported it to trading standards online :)

Whilst if it achieves something about the quality of BSOs it will be a good thing, I can't help wondering that it will (somehow) persuade some people that all bicycles are BSOs?

The Asda BSO, as seen/taken by myself:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcbazza/3795769733/

Hope John didn't wear that hat!

You tell em' John!!

Thank god for this! I work in Halfords this will hopefully mean theres no Traxs and feckn Vibes!

TBH the Apollos when built can be rideable.

Bike snobbery rules. Bikeradar and presumably South Coast Bikes have vested economic interests in folk only buying "proper" (read ludicrously over-priced) cycles. About time that sellers and promoters of bits of metal with 100 year old technology yet costing '00s of £s were exposed as profiteers.

meagain seems to know the content of this show before it's been aired. Can I have some lottery numbers please?

Safety is a different issue to over-priced kit. Wheel out your misplaced prejudice somewhere else.

BRITAIN NEEDS CHEAP BIKES!! Why can't someone make simple, cheap safe bikes that everyone will want? If you can buy a full suspension, disk brake pile of junk from toys R us why can't you get a simple, non-suspension town bike that will work for the same price?

thinking about it, they must be safe. surely they can do as a general runaround, commuter, its not going to be a bike that is going to get nicked as noone will want it, so long as someone who knows about bikes set it up then there should be no problem, maybe the fork was put on the wrong way to stop someone nicking it (although refer to earlier comment).

Britain certainly does need cheap bikes and something decent and safe probably could be had for £150 or so but people wouldn't buy it. Kids particularly want the whole full suspension b**lox so parents , strapped for cash and not knowing any different, will get the cheapest most easily available bike they see.

So far as safety, I suspect that many of these bikes will not be put together properly and even when they are (didn't C+ use a BSO in a recent article?) they will still rattle themselves apart pretty quickly. And they are so heavy and difficult to ride that anyone suckered into buying one for fitness riding or commuting will be put off for life. The Watchdog program can only help raise awareness that there are good bikes to be had for reasonable money and that BSOs are not the way to go

My sister got a BSO for a wonderful £100.

She rode it for a total 10 miles and then it lay in the shed unused for 10 years as it was too heavy and no fun. It then went to the dump.

What a saving! :(

Supersonic are you going to let them know about your supermarket bike build experience?

Shame they prevented the Association of Cycle Traders from taking part in the Watchdog show.

Big bike companies the world over (maybe giant specialized & trek to start with) will be able to produce a bog standard single speed for communting for a very good price

Well I've got a BSO - 70 pounds it cost. I use it for the run around to the school and the shop (with a trail along for the kid). Says max weight of 15 stone - I'm over that most of the time. Its worked fine. Gears are still indexed. brakes are in good order. Wheels are true. no rattling. That said I do service my bikes every so often and am ok with a spanner. I think for your average Joe who wants a bike then they mightn't be for them.. but before everyone gets all snotty about BSO's, I would say that the thing most likely to cause a problem with a bike is not the gearing etc.. but a puncture.. Millions of bikes sit rotting in sheds because their owners can't fix one.

@meagain

It's not bike snobbery. It would be great if it were possible to build a bike for a hundred quid or less that was safe, pleasant to use and could be assembled by the buyer. Loads of people would buy them, and it'd make a major contribution to cycling being a serious mode of transport again.

But it's not.

The first problem is that you need to know what you're doing to assemble a bike with derailleur gears, V-brakes and seperable handlebars and seatpost. An instruction sheet and a couple of rudimentary tools don't cut it.

It's bizarre that inexperienced and unqualified people should be expected to assemble a safety-critical piece of equipment like a bike. Nobody would expect to buy a self-assembly fridge, and you can't buy a toaster without the plug moulded into place.

But the bigger problem is that to hit the low prices, these bikes just have to be very very poor quality. Nothing fits together well, and nothing works well. For example, the derailleurs are so floppy and flexible they shift badly, and the brakes just don't work very well.

Safety issues aside, that's going to put people off riding, not encourage them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/22/asda-cheap-bike

My wife's Apollo is heavy and slow, I can't adjust the canti brakes to work properly. Although the trigger-shift 5 speed derailleur still works fine it doesn't make her want to cycle, she uses it because walking is the only alternative.

It's not just cash-strapped parents who buy full-sus abominations for 7 year olds, it's sheep-like people who think 'suspension' on a cheap kid's bike is a good idea. In some people's minds there is no point spending a lot as the kids leave the bikes in the rain covered in mud, ride them through/into/over stuff they shouldn't etc. My son looks after his bike (he knows he won't get another one if he doesn't), we take pride in keeping it cleaned and adjusted.

I bought a £70 Asda bike for my Mum - I am in no doubt that the average buyer would not be able to assemble this to a safe standard. Even a trained mechanic like myself found it a difficult task to build.

First thing is there is no way an average punter can finish off the assembly from the box with the supplied spanners and allen key (13mm and 15mm, with a 5/6mm key) - you need a 10mm spanner for the brakes, there is not enough leverage with the spanner for the wheels or pedals really, nor with the 5mm end of the key for the V blocks. The blocks were deeper than the rim so they either rubbed the tyre or overlapped. The front wheel need 5 mins with a spoke key as was way out of true and very lowly tensioned. The bottom bracket bearings were very tight and rough. Add to this poor quality non shimano/sram gripshift style gears and flexy brake levers and arms: it took me nearly 45 mins to build and adjust it with a proper tool kit! Also seemed to be some alignment problems with the stem, and the pressed steel seat collar wouldn't allow the seperate bolt to fit all the way through. Even when fully tightened, it slipped.

Meagain, this isn't snobbery, it is a very serious safety issue.

The shop I work in sells bikes from £160 upwards for adults and to be honest, anything sold for less than £200 is an absolute nightmare to make adjustments to a satisfatory standard. I have spent well over an hour on some cheaper bikes before I've been happy to let them out of the shop to be ridden. I agree that for £150 a single speed could be built to a sensible standard, but at that price because of the likes of Halfords customers expect 21 gears and full suss which just isn't possible if you want quality and the service to back it up

I saw the programe earlier. What a sad bunch of people you got off the street just so you could put some spin on the feature. Whomever it was that couldn't screw a pedal on properly deserves to be shot as far as I'm concerned. If this is a typical cross section of the general public then I'm not surprised our society is in a dire state.

I bought my daughter a cheap bike from Toys R Us 2 years ago and it works perfectly. Still. Ok so it weighs a ton but that just means she has to work harder (aren't we all complaining because we're all becoming obese anyway). She's never complained that it's uncomfortable and actually enjoys going out on it because, hard as it is for you to comprehend, riding a bike does not have to an experience akin to perching on a £3000 carbon racer or pro MTB.

Riding a bike is about finding a comfortable position (not as difficult as bike fitters will have you believe for a recreational bike) and just turning the crank. I rode a Grifter as a kid and boy was that thing a tank, hard to handle, the Sturmey Archer gears slipped and the brakes were truly naff. However I loved it and rode it day/night. If you enjoy riding it doesn't matter what you ride as you just want to be out and about.

Unfortunately it is down to snobbery/elitism as you have almost no evidence of injury/serious complaint or otherwise. In fact there's not even been a long term test of one of these bikes to ascertain if the components will fall to bits like you've claimed. For sure there will be some people that have had bad experiences but then there's a plethora of carbon frame failures on the internet too. Yet there's no Watchdog report about the dangers of carbon frames.

Ultimately we have to take responsibility for what we purchase. Anyone can walk into B&Q and buy a chain saw. We all know the safety issues and if you choose to buy one, knowing you have a clue, then you've only yourself to blame - not B&Q.

@Escargot - I tightened the pedals on the bikes after the members of the public had tried to assemble them. Every single one of them was loose.

As for a long-term test, Cycling Plus did exactly that and their bike did indeed start to fall apart, and one of the bikes in the Watchdog segment had a loose left hand crank after being ridden up the road a few times - at 6:18 or thereabouts: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2009/11/flat_pack_bikes.html

The strawman that we expect cheap bikes to ride like three grand carbon machines is ludicrous - but they can be pleasant to ride and safe, and these bikes aren't. There are examples of cheap bikes failing going right back to the 90s.

And it's irrelevant to the argument whether carbon bikes fail or not - we're talking about cheap bikes here, sold to the general public who are then expected to assemble them themselves.

Yes, you can buy a chainsaw from B&Q. It'll have shedloads of warnings about using it safely, you won't have to assemble it yourself and it'll conform to a serious safety standard rather than the 'it conforms if it's assembled right' standards set for bikes.

Ultimately, though, no, we don't have to take responsibility for what we purchase, because if society worked that way manufacturers could fob off all manner of dangerous and shoddy rubbish on us. The regulations that protect us from cars with poor brakes and bare wires in electrical appliances are part of the same framework that should stop flat-pack bikes from being sold.

Or would you like to go back to the world before Donohue vs Stevenson, snake oil remedies and total lack or corporate responsibility?

What Mountain Bike and MBUK has tested supermarket bikes in the past, and reached the same conclusions: poor quality parts, difficult to assemble, lose adjustment quickly and eventually fail. And having worked at one of these retailers for two years who sell boxed bikes I can assure Escargot of dozens upon dozens of complaints and failures relating to such equipment. The general public are not trained mechanics.

The hardest thing is convincing a person who hasn't ridden a bike since they were a kid that they should be spending anything other than a few quid. After all, what's the point of spending anything more on a bike if they don't know if they'll like cycling? I've heard this many times from people who then proceed to screw their faces up at the thought of going over 100 pounds for something rideable. Its a twisted logic since the same people spend a great deal of effort finding the best TV or mobile phone. They see the value of those products against the competition. With bikes, its just a bike.

Educating is the key and it doesn't come from a pile of second rate tat in a box from a supermarket - especially when those in the know struggle to assemble one of these with the kit provided.

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