See also: AutoBike documents

Country: USA

AutoBike was one of the brands owned by CSA Inc. of South Easton, Massachusetts. CSA was (is?) ‘a worldwide market leader in TV-driven fitness retail’ - which seems like English, but clearly isn’t. It may mean that they sold (sell?) shed-loads of cheap exercise machines on Home Shopping Network or QVC.

In 1997 CSA launched its AutoBike - a bicycle with a revolutionary automatic derailleur that was sold by a $10 million TV campaign featuring an ‘award winning infommercial’. (Can this get any more horrific?) The AutoBike was apparently ‘The Bike For the Rest of Us’ - if they were really spending $10 million promoting it, they had better been right.

A contributor to bikeforums.net describes its gear system as follows:

“There are three weights on the back wheel attached to the pie plate. As the wheel speeds up, they pull the plate out farther to the right, pushing the derailleur towards the smaller cogs. It has six cogs fixed to the hub, with a front sprocket freewheel system. The bike can then shift up or down whether or not the rider is pedaling. Coming to a stop always brings you back to first gear. It's a simple system, not much to go wrong.” More...