Decathlon btwin one second has been praised for its design and easy unfolding; it’s relatively cheap and still being produced.
Decathlon btwin one second has been praised for its design and easy unfolding; it’s relatively cheap and still being produced.
Praised by whom? The btwin folder is a low-rent and low quality version of a Dahon-style Chinese fold-in-half folder. That folding design is about 95% of the folding market, and has no clever design features whatsoever. It is simple to manufacture, has no patents, and is pretty bad in general riding use. It is neither fast to fold nor compact, and is very bad in customization, particularly with regard to the rider's reach. And it is really, really boring. Dahon and Tern have some okay bikes of this design, but the entire rest of the design category is dominated by bikes of quite poor quality, including the btwin.
The Decahlon folder folds faster than a Brompton. A friends of mine has both and he's trying to convince me on buying the cheap decathlon bike over a Brompton. The demonstration was convincing.
I'm a big fan of the fact that you can push a Brompton while folded. A feature that other folders miss.
Praised by most customers, probably. As an engineer I appreciate Bike Friday's attention to detail and I own a good few "artisan" devices myself, but the reality is that most people want a mass-produced bike that is "good enough" within their budget.
There's no doubt that your bike is higher quality than the Decathlon one, but the average customer doesn't appreciate how well engineered it is or how many patents (??) are involved.
Having lived in Italy and used the btwin folder quite a lot, I can assure you there are lots of basic folders in its category and price range which are much better. I'd look into Dahon and Tern for a basic folding bike.
Folding bikes are complex and hard to make safely, and the folding mechanism is costly to engineer right. This means that the manufacturer of a cheap bike is either providing you with a dangerous folding mechanism, or is putting a lot of the cost of the bike into the folding mechanism, so there's not much money left for the rest of the parts. Either way, it means that cheap folding bikes are a bad choice, and the btwin folder is a good example of that.
As to patents: yes, there are patents.
I have several bikes. My decathlon foldy is great.
I have consistently heard that the bikes by decathlon are very poor quality and fall apart easily. Is it a case of you get what you pay for?
Some data points: I bought a Decathlon folding bike (Fold 500; new, ~450€) a few months ago. Using it many times a week (probably more than it's intended).
No issues so far. Internet reviews (https://www.decathlon.fr/r/velo-pliant-fold-500/343354/undef...) are quite positive as well.
I've had other Decathlon bikes when I was a kid/teen, I don't recall any issue either.
This is what a lot of people want to be true, but in fact is not. I believe it can be mostly explained by the "IKEA effect": any given model is bought by so many people that the inevitable design defects are quickly found and remedied.
N=2, but my Decathlon bikes have well over 50000 km between them with no issues, beyond the usual wear and tear. Value wise, they are fantastic. They are road bikes, however, not the folding specifically.
Of course you get what you pay for. Note that this is not Decathlon’s cheapest folding bike.
With decathlon you have to watch the numbers...
100 series = basic and cheaper 900 series = advanced and more costly
i have (had) several cheap (under €500) single speed bikes and Decathlon is not the worst of them