The $1100 AeroCoach Wheel Hub: Crap Engineering, only surpassed by the Diabolical Customer Service
Let’s not sugar-coat it: AeroCoach’s Aeox wheel hub is an absolute shambles. For $1100, you’d expect cutting-edge engineering, durability, and maybe even a touch of cycling brilliance. What you get instead is a poorly-made piece of junk that seems more suited to a scrapyard than a high-performance bike.
What’s Wrong With It? Everything.
This hub isn’t just bad—it’s offensively bad. It looks like a premium product, but peel back the shiny exterior, and you’ve got a ticking time bomb of poor design, bad machining, and a total disregard for basic engineering principles.
The Machining is Garbage
This thing looks like it was machined with a hammer and a chisel. The grooves are uneven and jagged, introducing stress risers that practically beg the hub to fail. Seriously, this isn’t “precision engineering”—it’s amateur hour. For £900, you’d expect tight tolerances and flawless finishes. What you get is something that looks like it came out of the reject pile.
The Grooves Are a Joke
The grooves aren’t supposed to be there. They are a result of some of the worst machining you will ever see. The result of creating a stress raiser in a highly stressed location is a crack. And that is exactly what happened.
Radial Lacing: Are They Mad?
Then there’s the radial lacing. This hub isn’t built to handle it, and yet AeroCoach thought it was a good idea. The flange can’t take the tensile stress, so it deforms and eventually gives out. Any half-competent engineer would know this, but apparently, that’s not a requirement at AeroCoach.
How Does It Perform? Spoiler: It Doesn’t
Put this hub on your bike, and it’s not a question of if it will fail, but when. The machining flaws, dodgy grooves, and inappropriate lacing all combine into one glorious meltdown. It’s not just embarrassing—it’s dangerous. Fancy a high-speed crash because your £900 hub decided it couldn’t be bothered to stay in one piece? Didn’t think so.
AeroCoach Customer Service: Nowhere to Be Found
When something this bad hits the market, you’d expect the company to at least try to make things right. AeroCoach? Nope. Complaints are ignored, and customers are left to deal with the fallout. For a company charging premium prices, this level of apathy is just insulting.
Lessons AeroCoach Clearly Didn’t Learn
If you’re designing a hub—or anything, really—here’s some free advice for AeroCoach:
- Get the machining right. Uneven grooves and sloppy finishes aren’t acceptable, let alone at this price.
- Don’t weaken your product. Grooves should strengthen the hub, not make it prone to cracking.
- Understand your lacing. If your hub can’t handle radial lacing, don’t use it. It’s not rocket science.
- Test your products. Before releasing something, maybe check that it won’t explode under normal use. Just a thought.
And for the love of all things cycling, talk to your customers when they complain. Ignoring them isn’t a business strategy—it’s a reputation killer.
Final Thoughts
This hub is a joke. If you’ve got £900 lying around, spend it on literally anything else. A new bike, a holiday, 900 scratch cards—anything would be better than throwing it away on this disaster.
Watch on YouTube
Want to see how bad it really is? Check out the video:
Have your own stories of overpriced, underperforming garbage? Let me know. At least we can all laugh about it.
