Lately some of the robopacers, in addition to surging on climbs (which is Ok by me), also jump 10m forward in the group. Then they do it again, and again, usually after the hill, in 10m increments. So I go over the top, and soon it’s saying “wait for \<whoever\> ” and then like magic the gap behind goes from 42 to 22 to 12 to right on my tail and all the while I’m holding the robot’s rated power.
Robot (Coco and Miguel do this) display only their rated power but are going *much* faster.
It could be yet another response to robots getting dropped, but it’s really disheartening to put work into getting a safe gap and have them go flying blithely by anyway. I don’t see why it’s a problem for robots to get dropped.
Power is not speed. If you reduce power a bit for 20 seconds to allow the distance between you and the robopacer to begin to close, you could easily lose 10kmh at precisely the time that the RP is speeding up on the downhill with 50 other riders around them.
At this point, the differential between your speed and theirs will be massive, and riding at their stated pace won’t reduce that enough to stop them blasting past you.
If you get ahead of the RP, especially on a downhill, you need to let the gap close s-l-o-w-l-y. Even better, try not to get ahead in the first place. I recommend being old, slow and lazy.
I rode with Maria for 90 minutes today and all seemed normal.
This is probably because they are getting a lot of draft, so they go more quickly.
Has anyone noticed the robopacers being affected by blocking of the Pack Dynamics? Ordinary human riders are, but I haven’t noticed robopacers having difficulty going through their huge groups or getting stuck at the back.
If they really do appear to “teleport”, as opposed to just there being a significant speed differential sometimes, then that would point to a connection issue between your system and the Zwift servers. So in that case, from time to time the Zwift servers tell your device that the RP’s position is significantly different from what your device thought it was, and it causes the RP to appear to teleport.
Do you also see other riders sometimes appearing to do this teleporting?
