Wahoo Delays POWRLINK ZERO Speedplay Power Meter Pedals

This post will be a quickie. Namely, because I only have one line of information to share, but nonetheless, for what seems like a constant flow of people - that's the one line they want to know.

As you may remember, back in March, Wahoo announced the development of the Wahoo Speedplay-based power meter pedals, called POWRLINK ZERO. At the time, they released some initial information, though didn't include all technical or product aspects. For example, we didn't get things like price or accuracy levels, but did get weight (138g per pedal, excluding cleat mounting) and pedal body (Speedplay Zero). But one other thing we got was the planned shipping date, which Wahoo stated as "Summer 2021".

(As a reminder, Summer 2021 technically runs from June 20th to September 22nd. Fun aside: Did you know that summer doesn't actually end at midnight, but rather at 3:21 PM? For realz. Oh, and yes, we know, Australia - your summer is coming. But Wahoo is based in Atlanta, and thus, their summer seasons are the ones that matter.)

Still, most people tend to think of summer as June/July/August, and thus the questions about whether Wahoo will ship the pedals this summer have reached never-ending status in my inbox and YouTube messages folder. And this ignores Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and carrier pigeon messages.

So, I asked Wahoo what the deal-e-o was.

Wahoo says they are "still actively developing the pedal", but that "Unfortunately, it will not be available this summer as previously announced."

They said they don't have an updated lease timeframe at this point, or anything else to share beyond the comment above. Though, they did post the POWRLINK ZERO manual a while back to their support site.

Ultimately, power meters are hard. And pedal-based power meters are very hard. It's even harder when it's your first on-bike power meter, though, Wahoo does have lots of experience in power meters in trainers. As a point of comparison, one only need to look at the years of delays to get from Metrigear to Garmin Vector, or for Xpedo to give up, or for Brim Brothers to give up, or for IQ2...to...well..to who knows what's going on there. Or the countless other technical issues along the way for virtually every company in the space...albeit except Favero and PowerTap. Both of those actually went relatively smoothly and on-time.

Oh...and finally one last preemptive comment that I keep seeing a few places: No, Wahoo did not license/acquire/etc the pod from Favero. Both Wahoo and Favero have confirmed this, and Keith Wakeham has a super-geeky deep-dive explaining this and many other things in far more detail.

With that - thanks for reading!