Earlier today, I read this review of Mavic’s Ksyrium SLR Exalith wheelset, and I think I can sum up the between-the-lines part of the review pretty succinctly: Mavic is bringing back CD hard coating, and it still squeals.

To be fair, they did come up with a new name for it: “Exalith” (pronounced like a small child with a horrible cold trying to say the word “excellent”). So the marketing department did their turn at the front, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing new under the neon yellow sun.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on at Mavic these days, and to be fair to Mavic, there’s no shortage of hyped up, modernized, and soulless versions of old ideas forever getting rehashed out there, but in the early ’90s, a lot of the bicycle business was Mavic’s to lose, and it’s pretty clear to everyone now that they’ve figured out some pretty spectacular ways to lose it.

I have no idea how the company’s doing. Industry rags tend to pass on data more than research it, meaning corporate governance in these matters is largely unavailable, and usually a company goes from “reporting record sales” to disappearing in the span of a few months. Everyone except the employees act shocked, and then we all go back to playing Angry Birds and participating in Our Lifestyle. But ever since Mavic as a corporation chose to neither assassinate a guy named Stan Koziatek, nor purchase his outstanding company outright, the wheels have really seemed to come off (pun intended).

Mavic is a company that was founded in 1889. Back then, they did some innovative things that worked. More recently they did some innovative things that didn’t work so well, but made a great market for others, and things that completely didn’t work, but were still innovative. When it comes to the Exalith rim coating, it seems like they’ve figured out how to create fresh performance problems without really inventing anything new.

The sad thing is that there’s a genuine problem with the braking surfaces on carbon fiber road rims for which we could really use a solution. In a world of competing carbon fiber rims with slippery and sometimes unreliable braking surfaces, there is a genuine need for something innovative.

How obvious is the need? Caley Fretz, the author of the VeloNews review, begins by basically addressing this issue–one that the product being reviewed doesn’t actually address:

Let’s be honest: most of us would love to roll around on carbon hoops every day, if not for the various impracticalities doing so would provoke. They’re light, sprightly, and look damn cool — the latter being more important than we’d care to admit. The problem is that carbon is ridiculously expensive to buy and replace, has a tendency to crack, and doesn’t brake particularly well. Not a solid recipe for an everyday wheelset.

Mavic has an answer for those who have come to terms with their cycling vanity, accepting their lust for things black and carbon-looking as an untenable but utterly unavoidable force of nature. They even add a nice little performance boost to the equation. It’s called Exalith, and it can be found on Mavic’s Ksyrium SLR (tested here), Comete disc, Cosmic Carbone SLR, Cosmic Carbone SLE, and R-Sys SLR.

This reads a hell of a lot like Mavic had invented a brake track coating for carbon rims. In fact, at least one very smart guy I know of read it that way, too, largely because that’s what the words tell you. To “come to terms with your vanity” for carbon fiber “as an untenable but utterly unavoidable force of nature” means to give in to crabon carbon.

It reads that way because writers hoping to write crap people will read tend to automatically veer toward the relevant, and a durable brake track coating for a carbon fiber rim is what people want. What people don’t give as much of a shit about is a coating that makes your aluminum rims last longer, but generates Bieberesque squeals. And costs $1800.

Yes. Ask for a more durable brake track for carbon wheels, and Mavic offers to sell you carbon-colored aluminum rims for only a few hundred dollars more than some genuine carbon wheelsets. Or maybe you’re fine with aluminum rims, except that they only seem to last ten years (or 293 Mavic hubs), and you’re sick of trying to find replacement rims for your decade old wheelset. Seriously, is “Unhappy With Lifespan of Aluminum Rim” still a demographic? For a 700c rim? And, according to the article, Mavic says no cyclocross allowed on these, so that limits things to, what? Those of us in need of a really expensive sub-1500g touring rim with spokes no shop stocks? That squeals every time the brakes are applied?

I still believe Mavic is capable of once again becoming the best wheelset manufacturer in the world, but the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem. That’s always been a tough one for any organization trying to recover lost glory. Mavic plus Exalith is McTallica plus Lou Reed. In the immortal/Facebook-stored/government archived words of Stevil Kinevil, “This is the result of 20 years of not being told you suck.”

The View by Lou Reed & Metallica

The Sound of Exalith