Our Approach
When developing AiRO we have to make dozens of decisions each day. For many decisions there is no right or wrong answer, but more a decision on what you want company we want to be. Here, we share our values with you, so you can understand how we make our decisions, and if AiRO is a fit for you.
What we want to be:
Useful – We succeed when our users are faster on race day because of us.
Easy to use – Current aero testing approaches are too complex. We want to offer a simpler alternative.
Affordable - The fastest aero position is yet to be found, there is an infinite number of possibilities to explore. The more affordable we are, the more our customers can test, and the more riders we can reach.
Accurate – Our goal is to help you be faster on race day, not just in a simulation.
Continuously improving: Learn and iterate – This is just the beginning of AiRO. Computers will get faster and science will progress. There is more to come and a lot left to learn.
Priorities are especially important if some goals conflict with each other. Here are a couple examples:
We could make AiRO more accurate by requiring more pictures and body measurements from our customers, but this would increase the barrier of entry. Through testing we determined the smallest number of inputs we can use to give accurate aero information, and for the more detail-oriented riders we offer to fine tune their Digital Aero Twin with additional measurements.
CFD simulations tend to become more accurate as the cell count increases and there are potentially more accurate approaches to model turbulence than what we employ. We chose an approach allowed to turn around simulations in around five minutes and for $10 or less while validating in the wind tunnel that we can capture the aerodynamic effect of most pose or helmet changes accurately. (Read more in our benchmarking reports.)
We allow our users to adjust aspects of their position with sliders. Currently, we have 18 adjustments you can make and we believe this captures most pose changes our riders are looking for. We are trying to strike a trade off between enabling our riders full control, while not being overwhelming to new users.
Five years ago, when I ran CFD for a large bike company, the kind of simulations we run today would have taken hours and cost more than $100. Computers keep getting faster every year, science progresses and we will learn from our users feedback.
We have released AiRO as a commercial product because we believe it meets our bar for being useful. We are excited to provide the ability to get aerodynamic feedback 10x cheaper and faster than tunnel testing and we know you can use AiRO to go faster come race day – our very first client won the world championship for the first time after we used AiRO to help them. But that does not mean AiRO is perfect. We believe we can continue to make AiRO easier to use, more accurate, and enable more use cases. AiRO is developed by people that can err, make mistakes and wrong decisions. We look forward to being in open conversation with our users to learn how we can improve and we aim to admit mistakes.
Where we know of current limitations we will document them on our Limitations page. No measurement tool is perfect, but you should expect the tool makers to be open about what it can and can’t do.
A culture of continuous improvements provides a challenge for measurement companies: New versions of AiRO will provide results that are more accurate than old versions, but that means the results will also be different. This means that simulations with a new approach might not be comparable to simulations with an old approach. We are aware that our customers invest money in their testing library, and want to continue comparing to old results, and not start from scratch at every update. We intend to roll out improvements to accuracy thoughtfully and in a way that maximizes the value to our customers.
We are thankful you are on this journey with us and we can’t wait to make you faster.
Ingmar Jungnickel, Founder AiRO
