“Oi! You’re not getting away, I’m on a leccy!”: Police officer chases down suspected shoplifter and “sausage” on an e-bike in bizarre chase + more on the live blog

@open_roads I was looking for a flat-bar performance hybrid bike recently. I know they're inherently cheaper than drop bar bikes but the level of kit and integration available on non-electric versions is insane for the price. I ended up buying an equipped Trek FX Sport Equipped for £720 brand new. Dynamo lights, rack, full mudguards, Tiagra/Deore level shifters and brakes. Cube, Merida, Orbea, and Giant were similarly good value; it was just unfortunate that the Orbea I wanted wasn't in stock as I'd prefer to have given my money to a Basque co-operative rather than a US megacorp. That's a very difficult market for a low volume regional supplier to operate in. I would likely have bought a Temple had they been available to order but I suspect I'm a bit of a niche customer having had a Fairlight previously.

@Rome73 It doesn't seem to have held back Atherton who seem to be doing a pretty good volume of export orders. So perhaps although the Temple Cycles bikes were great, they just weren't highly differentiated enough - the market for classically styled bikes is pretty saturated in Europe and the urban premium market has rapidly shifted to electric bikes. The wider bike retail trends are likely to have played a role too. The likes of Dorel and Pon are shedding hundreds of thousands of bikes in different brands from their EU inventories and at massive discounts - the overall market for selling full price bikes is incredibly tough. If the big players can't read the market correctly, the little players face a huge challenge. Given much of the enormous fundraiser appears to have been spent my guess would be that Temple spent too much on fixed costs (2 x shops, 1 x Factory) and that margin / cashflow / liquidity was the core problem. TLDR Really sorry to see Temple Cycles go - their bikes looked great. But they have done well to plough through the fundraiser cash in such a short time. Cash is king.

@samuri I was going to say the same. 1) Drivers need to use their eyes. There is a reason the practical driving test involves an eye-sight test. 2) I am imagining that (as You've rightly said: everyone would need to use it to make it work) we will have to put a chip in every human at birth which is internet and GPS connected... I'm sure Lone Skum is working on it right now. And Bill Gates was trialling this with Covid vaccines. #sarcasm

So massive investment for a small company and still didn't make any profit. Pity the workers who are losing their jobs and suppliers that may not get paid. But, the directors are allowed to start a new limited company

So massive investment for a small company and still didn't make any profit. Pity the workers who are losing their jobs and suppliers that may not get paid. But, the directors are allowed to start a new limited company and still pay themselves....

It's always a shame to see a local company go under especially given that Brexit presumably kicked all their EU sales. But they also never seemed like great value for money. As far as I could tell they were in the same vein as Genesis: making old-school frames out of standard steel tube-sets, fitting some quite nice finishing kit and then charging premium prices for them. They looked like nice bikes when I've seen them out on the road, but the designs don't look like anything special. When you compare to companies like Fairlight who are using custom tubesets, offer so many sizes that they're near-custom fit, and then let you spec pretty much every component for the same money, the value for money for a Temple just wasn't there.

What a stupid idea. I hope Garmin receive cyclist feedback on this. Here's how drivers should be spotting cyclists: BY LOOKING OUT OF THEIR WINDOWS INSTEAD OF AT THEIR CAR INFOTAINMENT SCREENS. As the headline suggests, this will only ever work if every cyclist has a Garmin, turns on live tracking, and every driver has a Waze enabled device in their car and pays attention to it. And even then it won't work. For those who aren't aware, Waze users routinely make mistakes when identifying 'hazards'. For example, if a National Highways car is parked somewhere, Waze users will consistently mark it as a police car despite it being a completely different colour. They're not the brightest group.

‘Temple Cycles was always selling its bikes globally, in particular into Europe. Brexit created a lot of barriers and pushed up our costs to export our bikes in a big way.’ Amazingly, people actually believed the crap and lies that leaving the EU would help UK business. Now that the UK government is trying to correct some of the stupidity of Brexit there are people who still defend Brexit! They are like MAGA, tenacious in their ignorance.

Homemade is great but if you want to go ready made a shout out for Nakd protein bars, my regular for long rides and hikes now, nothing but fruit and nuts and natural flavouring, 15g carbs, 10g fat, and 8g protein, 200 calories and even counts as one of your five a day. £26 for a box of 36 on Amazon.

@kil0ran Good point! "The next monthly outdoor meeting of the Rolex owners' club will be..." With the most expensive Garmin being almost a grand now, and if it integrates with Garmin watches they run up to £2800, worth the scrotes turning up just for the device.