Wishlist: Shimano Ultegra Di2

Today's post actually comes on the back of some pretty exciting news from the Japanese bike parts manufacturer.  They introduced this back in the Fall and brought with it some pretty big leaps in bike tech.  Prior to it all shifting that was done on a bike for mainstream products was by mechanical movement (pulling or slackening a cable) which seemed like it was a little bit old fashioned to Shimano, so they made an electronic group.  The Di2 stands for Digital Integrated Intelligence.  It's got a CPU on the front mech which allows for some cool stuff to happen while shifting.

Now with electronic shifting, you literally just push a button and it'll move your mechs for you.  Everything is still the same just as if it were the mechanical version.

Now some other things electronic shifting allow you is that the front mech will actually time when it's the best point to do a shift, and it's not going to be a huge delay like multiple seconds, but rather just a position on the cassette.  There's specific notches that are so called "shifting gates".  All of this is done through the front mech, which also trims your front cage so that you won't get any chain rub and therefore no noise.

The rear mech will just keep on whirring away based on your button clicks, and hopefully shouldn't drop your chain like Andy's did at least years tour, but apparently he was having chain problems on a tt recently so maybe I should hold my toungue on that comment. It looks more or less just like the mechanical version but instead of having a metal cable go through, there's just an electric wire that goes into the unit.

Now with all this talk of it being electronic, there clearly has to be a battery right? Well that looks like it's been more or less transferred over, and it still looks about the same, and like the other batteries, this can mount below your bottle cage relatively easily

So there you have it, brand spanking new gear from Shimano.  The Dura Ace version works great, that's why a ton of pros use it.  Fortunately, it's going to be coming down quite a bit in price, probably around 1500 bucks which is still a lot, but a TON cheaper than the Dura Ace version of it.   Rumor has it that it should be hitting bikes by the time the fall trade shows come around, when manufactures start announcing 2012 bikes.

~Cheers