Yahoo News The next generation of folding bicycles are faster, lighter and available to hire
Every type of bike comes with its own distinct bit of cultural baggage. Fixies, of course, still imply an owner with a fondness for geometric wrist tattoos and a career at a small-batch sake distillery. A top-end carbon fibre road bike suggests you obsessively glare at cycling social network Strava and chug energy gels at traffic lights.
And then there’s the folding bike: as sure a sign as any that you belong to the tribe of trouser-clipped creatives wheeling their customisable steeds off a rush hour train.
Until recently the purest way to gain entry to this cult has been to fork out for one of Brompton’s beloved two-wheelers. No longer. From foldable hire schemes and sleekly designed new brands to collapsible e-bikes and eccentric crowdfunded innovations, change is afoot.
The brightest minds in technology are devoting themselves to more lightweight materials and smart ways to get you around — reinventing the wheel, if you will. When it comes to folders, there have never been more ways to get on board.
And, in truth, not all of these portable rides actually “fold” in the traditional sense. Take Whippet, designer and cycling obsessive Graham Powell’s new entry into a market where sector leader Brompton plans to sell 100,000 bikes a year by 2022.
“My whole thing has always been challenging tradition and convention in design,” says Powell. “So I thought: ‘It’s a folding bike but does it have to fold?’” This cognitive breakthrough ultimately led to the Whippet (whippetbicycle.com), a beautifully minimal compact bike that uses “in-line” retraction rather than traditional folding. “It’s taller and slimmer, rather than shorter and fatter,” says Powell, nodding to the bike’s 190mm stowed width and Albert, the pet whippet/company mascot who gave it its name.
Powell, who studied at the Royal College of Art, has designed the Whippet with space-strapped Londoners in mind. “A lot of people buy them after they’ve had their normal bike stolen,” he says. “And we’ve all had that thing of having to squeeze past a bike in the hallway, dropping your shopping. This answers those questions quite well.”
As well as a neat stowaway mechanism, which reduces into a rollable frame that’s 30 per cent of its normal volume, the Whippet aims to improve on the ride quality offered by other folders. The wheels are 20in rather than Brompton’s dinky 16in and flexible oval-shaped tubes soak up bumps in the road without the need for suspension or dampeners.
“A Brompton is an amazing folder but most people don’t ride it for more than 10 miles,” says Powell. “I’ve got quite a few bicycles — mountain bikes, racers, everything — and I can ride the Whippet over 40 or 50 miles just as well as I can a racer.”
Having won over the Brompton and Moulton heads at this year’s Bespoked festival in Bristol, Powell is gearing up for production and hoping to take pre-orders later this year. He envisions the top-of-the-range model will cost around £3,000 and ship early next year.
If you’re after something that’s less of a sizeable investment the Brompton Bike Hire scheme (bromptonbikehire.com) may well be the answer. Available for as little as £3.50 a day from lockers outside 11 London stations, it offers a more flexible alternative to Boris Bikes. To keep pace with demand, more docks are planned for later this year.
By then, Brompton’s next grand innovation will have been unveiled. Made in collaboration with Formula 1 team Williams, the Brompton Electric (brompton.com) will be the company’s £2 million attempt to conquer the growing market for “pedelec” bicycles: hybrid bikes that store pedal power and give you a battery-assisted boost up steep inclines. It’s expected in late 2017.
It’s not the only new attempt to marry smart tech with old-fashioned engineering nous. Inspired by Clive Sinclair’s original rucksack-sized oddity, the A-Bike Electric (£699.99, a-bike.co.uk) is a teeny-tiny, chargeable cross between a scooter and a folding bike that, providing you don’t mind looking like the star of a Nathan Barley reboot, offers a breathtakingly light option.
Elsewhere, the Galaxy from Beijing-based company 700bike (around £860, 700bike.com) manages to cram an impressive amount of clever kit — Kevlar-coated anti-puncture tyres, Bluetooth connectivity, a frame-mounted display screen — into a competitively-priced package.
And if you just want something that’s not punishingly heavy to lug up the escalator at Holborn, the Hummingbird (£3,495, hummingbirdbike.com) is another crowdfunded folder that, thanks to its carbon frame, weighs about half as much as the average Brompton.
So whether you adopt a Whippet, hire a Brompton or go electric, there’s never been a better time to join the fold.
