With almost five years on the market, Pioneer has proven their commitment to the cycling market, and proven their product on the Pro Tour stage. Now, they’re proving the benefit of being a large scale consumer electronics manufacturer, too, by dropping their prices to very, very competitive levels.
The latest Pioneer dual-leg power meters for Shimano Dura-Ace R9100 and Ultegra R8000 were introduced at Interbike. Now, just a few months after their debut, they’re dropping prices by $200-$300 for complete cranksets with pre-installed power meters. That means a brand new Dura-Ace crankset with individual left/right power measurement for $1,299. Or get Ultegra for just $999. It’s not quite as sleek as the fully integrated Shimano power meter, but it’s now considerably less expensive and comes with Pioneer’s impressive suite of measurements and analysis.
Already have your own Shimano cranks? Get the Pioneer PM9100C Consumer Kit from $799 (down from $999) and send them in to have Pioneer clean and install the dual power meter kit onto your existing cranks.
Of course they did, stuff didn’t work just like everything else budget focused. Still only one powermeter to buy, it’ll cost you more but SRM is still the best and most accurate. Nothing else survives 2-3 seasons under Pro Tour riders without an issue.
Yet most of the pro teams using SRM have just dropped them to switch to the built-in Shimano power meters!
Money Talks, that’s why.
And Shimano has a ton of it to throw around the World Tour teams. Srm? Not so much.
They are not paid to ride shimano, but shimano can say ride our power meters, otherwise you can’t have our groupsets.. The groupsets to outfit like 100 bikes for a pro tour team is a shit ton of money. That’s a lot of power.
Such movement does not imply that shimano’s pm is superior to srm. It merely shows the way shimano have used to kick off comepetitors from sponsorship market. Shimano have always threatened pro teams (supported by shimano) not to use 3rd party drivetrain components e.g. fsa,.. etc. nowadays shimano makes pm too.
It’s call sponsorship. They ride what they are paid to ride
Yes. That’s it!
$1300 units are “budget focused”?!? This sh*t is way out of my league.
Stages…less than $400 bucks #’s correlated nearly perfectly to my PowerTap hub and old SRM
But your $400 is a Left-Only solution, and the Pioneer is Left/Right, so that’s not a proper comparison when you look at functionality (or limitations of the 1-leg Stages in this example).
Stages:
Ultegra R8000 Left/Right is $999
D-A 9100 Left/Right is $1299
So they are identical in price to the Pioneer.
Pioneer still requires that you stick on magnets at the bottom bracket area. Pretty much all their competitors no longer require this. My guess is Pioneer has an updated version coming out later this year and is trying to sell off inventory.
You don’t need to install magnets on their system…run plenty of Pioneers magnetless. However, they do function better with magnets, and only give you all of their crazy metrics with magnets. But with a regular Ant+ computer they work fine without.