This morning the tail light to my bike, the Cat Eye LD 170 met a tragic end shortly after it fell off my bike as I crossed 30th Street. I heard something fall, got to the West side, turned around, and saw a late model white Honda Accord CRUSH it under its front driver’s side tire. I was so shocked that I did not bother to chase down the culprit, or get the license plate number. Grr. I waited for other cars to pass (and not run over it again…does this mean the Accord driver purposely ran over it?) before picking up the remains among the debris of red plastic and shattered light-emitting diodes. The rest of it was intact.
Why do I make such a big deal of this? Well, this is no ordinary economy tail light. See, most of them are just LAME. For some reason the manufactures think a good tail light has eight different blink patterns and one on/off button, so you have to press the button several times before turning it off. Not the LD 170. It has just three: on, off, and blinking. And if it’s off, you press the buttom once to switch to one on mode, and again to turn it off, and again to go to the other on mode. So, with the light in arms reach under the seat, you can press the button and know that it’s on, without looking.
It turns out that Cat Eye is in Boulder, so I called them – to ask about the warranty, and to commend their engineers. The customer service woman said that I could actually drop off the light and they would send me a new one. “We stand behind our products,” she said. I’m thinking: “It got run over by a car” I don’t think I can do that in good conscience, though. It was somewhat my fault – I’d had the bike in my car the day before, and the clip must have gotten lose from the seat-bag strap. Also, I like the prouct so much, shouldn’t I just buy another?
