Titanium - a bike for life or 6 months

Any time I read comments about Ribble it's not good. After a while you start to think they can't all be wrong. Whatever the rights and wrongs here, you can't accuse them of courting good publicity through word of mouth!

I share your pain, I badly bent and cracked a lovely steel Salsa Vaya on a similar awkward slow crash (rolling down a smooth steep rock slab not realising there was a 1ft drop to flat at the bottom).

Salsa helped as best they could (much better than 10%...), assisted by Charlie the Bikemonger, but I still ended up out of pocket.

Covered under home insurance?

I think you have to chalk this one down to bad luck.

Whilst a bike might be strong and durable in normal use (and tolerate a bit of abuse), I do think a crash (even a relatively slow one) can produce significant forces that the bikes are generally not built to withstand. Building a bike that could withstand crash damage, in all the myriad of forms that could take, would result in a bike that is massively overbuilt for normal use.

Bad luck, and at least you're OK.

I wonder whether the damage is due to the type/thickness of tubes used or a fault in manufacture... I also have a Ti bike and had a similar crash on only its third ride out(!) (I didn't hit a piece of wood, someone in a car coming in the opposite direction decided to turn right, across my path). The other factors, 10mph impact speed (from GPS), over the bars/back of the car sound very similar.

I was concerned about both the carbon fork steerer and the frame itself. My LBS has some tools for checking frame alignment, and they gave it a clean bill of health, so maybe either I was lucky or you have a dodgy frame. 

It maybe worth finding a shop yourself that has similar tools (I think they were this and this), and checking how far out it is, and perhaps going after Ribble again with either a "fit for purpose" or "satisfactory quality" angle to try and get them to up their 10% offer, in consumer law, surely any reasonable person would expect something sold as a gravel bike to be able to take a 10mph OTB spill without bending? 

Ti bikes (or bikes of any material, really) can be made very light, or very strong, or a balance between the two. For a bike that's supposed to be a fun ride and not, say, part of an abused fleet of bikeshare bikes, the designer is going to choose tubing that can take normal riding loads for that type of bike, with a bit of a safety factor.

I'm sure a frame could be made that can take a crash like that, but would you have bought the frame if it weighed 1-2 kg more?

I've seen a number of reports of cracked titanium, particularly around welds, but not bent.

Any metal bike will bend in an impact, and the top tube/down tube bends are very characteristic of a frontal impact. In the old days of lugged or brazed steel frames, a frame-builder could melt out the brazing and insert new tubes, making the bike good as new, but with electric welding, no chance. At least metal frames are recyclable, unlike carbon...