Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => Freewheeling => Folders => Topic started by: pumpkin on 17 April, 2019, 02:55:48 pm
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An 'affordable' Brompton? Looks quite good.
https://www.brompton.com/bikes/b75-bike
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It’s an odd duck. No configurability and deliberately sabotaged with no left folding pedal and a 44t chainring. Also uses the old style handlebars.
It is about £200 cheaper than the standard 3-speed, so definitely worth considering.
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Easy enough to swap the pedal, but a Brommie with a non-folding platform pedal on the left isn't much fun for trains etc. 44T ring is fine. Are those the old style brake levers?
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Are those the old style brake levers?
Not sure. They look a bit different in one of the pictures.
They're using bargain generic platform pedals rather than the non-folding versions of their standard pedals, so the brake levers might also be something new (and cheap).
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It looks like it's a limited run model to get ride of old stock. Old saddle, handlebars, shifter, brakes and possibly more that I have missed.
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I never had a folding pedal, but did use the brommie cover, which makes a considerable difference.
Looks fine to me.
MrsC was looking at folding bikes in halfrauds. Of the 3 makes on display, she couldn't fold a single one without seriously hurting her hands. Details like that matter and this 'cheap' brommie will still have better folding mechanisms.
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There used to be a Brompton C3 that used up old stock components at a cheaper price that made it easy for shops to upsell more expensive Brompton models. Nothing new under, etc.
https://www.urbanscooters.com/products/brompton-c3e-folding-bicycle
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They're taking the mickey. 10 years ago, an M3L or S3L was £550, and it was overpriced then Now it's twice the price. What other consumer products have doubled in price in the last ten years? Brompton have benefitted massively from bike-to-work schemes, enabling them to crank the price up to the usual £1000 limit.
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Even with the new larger factory they’re probably cranking them out about as fast as they can make them, so charging the highest price the market can bear is just normal business practice, whatever you think they’re “worth”.
Even at higher prices they don’t seem close to the point of pricing themselves out of the market. I’m quite surprised that no one seems to be selling direct clones of the design, at least not in volume in western markets.
(The other consumer good that’s doubled in price is iPhones. For a long time they were £500-ish quid off contract. They’re now routinely over £1000. A lot of the same dynamics apply)
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While I'm not arguing that a modern smartphone is necessarily worth £1,000, the latest models are markedly more sophisticated than those of five years ago. Can the same be said of a Brompton..?
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FWIW £550 a decade a go is more like £725 after inflation, so it's 'only' a 33% increase in real terms. I suppose in terms of other luxury goods (which a Brompton arguably is) that's not too bad - look e.g. at how the price of luxury watches has gone up in that time.
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Brompton are a pretty litigious company and will stamp on any clones. The patents are long expired but they have successfully used copyright law to protect things like the curved seat tube (surely essential for the most compact design, since it allows the rear wheel to tuck in tighter) and the moustache bars (again, essential to get an upright position, since the "stem" length is necessarily limited by needing to fold). Copyright law is not supposed to be used for functional design elements but it probably comes down to who has the most money to throw at lawyers.
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Copyright law is not supposed to be used for functional design elements but it probably comes down to who has the most money to throw at lawyers.
When I spoke to WB a few years back he had the opposite view... not worth having intellectual property if you can't defend it and Brompton doesn't have many lawyers on their payroll.
His argument was that it is quite hard to copy what they do and make it work flawlessly and that's their USP