Pendle Bike Racks

I’m an avid biker. I started riding bikes when I was six and took it more and more seriously as time progressed. I’m now 34, so I’d consider that’s 28 years of bike riding experience under my trusty belt.

Over the years I’ve learned that research is key when making any purchase. Plenty of money was wasted in my younger years on parts and accessories that didn’t do what I wanted or were poorly manufactured and ended up broken. Always do your research.

It was with this in mind that I started looking for quality reviews on bike racks. I recently bought a new Mercedes ML and I needed a decent bike rack to fit on the back of it. First stop was bikeradar.com, a site with a readership of nearly 100,000 users, plenty of back links and is considered a well respected voice of authority in the biking world, so you might forgive me when I took their review of the Pendle Strap on Rack as gospel.

“This sturdy tubular metal rack fits virtually any car, from saloons to flat-backed MPVs. When not in use, it folds up and will fit in any boot….four out of five stars!”

What they failed to mention was that this pathetic excuse for a product is so far from achieving its simple goal of holding bikes to the back of your car that it might as well have been put together by blind drunken Pirates. Had I not paid £100 for it I might have found its very existence hilarious but as it stands I find its prominent position in the world entirely depressing. Let me walk you through what this whorish bike rack did to my car.

I’m known amongst my friends as someone who likes to get things right, my attention to detail borders on obsessive. If I’m going to do something, I like to go about it “the right way”, and so I meticulously consulted the instructions. Unhappy with the lack of vivid detail I called Pendle Bike Racks for clarification on installation. I spoke to an assistant  who walked me through the installation process until I could practically run a Pendle Bike Rack installation school. I was a bike rack Jedi by the time I’d got off the phone and before long I’d installed my spangly new Pendle Bike Rack to my spangly new Mercedes ML. Simples.

The next step was to put my bikes on the bike rack, drive to a location of my choosing, remove bikes, ride bikes, replace bikes, drive home. I did all of this successfully.

It wasn’t the installation which led to the imploding portions of my sanity, taking this bike rack off of your car is where the nightmare really begins. It’s like trying to remove barbed Velcro from a mute Persian cat, a silent and tragic affair. Let me show you the meal it made of my two-week old Mercedes.

Now, call me old fashioned, but I’m a firm believer in following simple design protocol.  “I want to design a car bike rack. It must a) hold the bike to the car b) be removable c) not scratch the vehicle to shit town and back.” Evidently, the Pendle Bike Rack delivers successfully on only one of the above.

Product fail

I was more than a little annoyed about what had happened to my car, so against all my British inclinations I filed a complaint with picture  evidence of the damage. The next day I got the first of a series of strange replies, I’ll summarise what they said. “There’s no way that’s the products fault, you have failed to follow instructions properly, the bike rack’s rubber feet or your car were dirty upon installation.”

It seems that Pendle Bike Racks weren’t aware they were dealing with the bike rack Jedi. My car was fresh off the production line; clean as a whistle before I cleaned it again in preparation for the bike rack’s installation. I had so far failed to tell them I had been in touch with one of their very own installation advisers to streamline my installation process to the point that a failure on my part wasn’t possible.

It was at this point that I think things took a turn for the bizarre. For clarification, the red emphasis is mine.

She hoped that telling me their bike racks inevitably mark any vehicle they go near would resolve the matter? They might as well have said “Oh, yeah…of course your car is scratched! Our product is a flaming pile of horse shit! What did you expect to happen!?” And that last sentence… please forgive my frustration and allow me to paraphrase, “Since we’re fully aware this strap on bike rack bastardises paintwork and is of no use to anyone, would you like to purchase one of our bike racks which doesn’t ruin everything it comes into contact with?”

All of this coming after they imply I’m a fool for not following their “fool proof” instructions which were so clear as to NOT mention that installation of this shit cake of a bike rack will scratch your vehicle.

Instead of offering a refund on a product that did more than its own worth in damage, they asked me if I’d like to buy a new and better product!? Their bike rack caused damage to the tune of £150-£250 in scratch repairs and their “resolve” is to suggest I buy a new bike rack? Their logic threw me off the trail. After a few rage inducing phone calls it became clear that a refund was out of the question and Pendle Bike Racks weren’t going to play ball, so I looked for other ways to manifest my anger.

The first thing that came to mind was their domain name – it seemed a bit iffy, they’re called Pendle Bike Racks and yet their domain is www.pendle-bike.co.uk. They surely owned pendlebikeracks.co.uk didn’t they? Fifteen minutes later I was the proud owner of said domain, in fact, you’re reading pendlebikeracks.co.uk right now. I took it upon myself to tell the nation, and indeed the world, not to buy Pendle Bike Racks, unless of course you can “accept that some sort of marking is inevitable.” It’s a simple fact they’re concealing from their customers – by all means manufacture a bike rack that scratches vehicles, but in the very least make sure you tell people “this bike rack scratches vehicles”. Since Pendle Bike Racks refuse to do that, I took it upon myself to carry out their duty.

I figured that if you found this blog post interesting in anyway you might link to it with the anchor “bike racks”, then maybe, just maybe, this domain will rank higher than pendle-bike.co.uk for that keyword and people will know that their bike racks cause significant damage to your car. Here’s the link you’ll need to help out:

<a href=”http://pendlebikeracks.co.uk/”>bike racks</a>

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 3:09 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.