Well someone needs to rewrite the Dahon wikipedia page then and tell max.com bikes in Bulgaria about it. Even on the wiki page it says assembly plants which is normally a description of facilities that merely assemble parts from elsewhere. What Dahon wants to state to the public and what actually happens are two different things. Would Dahon state we buy in frames to our design from another chinese manufacturer, reducing their weight and strength and then assemble the bikes in our factories and sell them at a premium price well beyond similar folding bikes?

Also their facebook comment is clearly rubbish. 100% manufactured means everything which is clearly false with all the third party components and they state a single factory where as the european bikes at least some of them are coming out of Bulgaria and a Macau plant is mentioned on the wikipedia page. I mean how much more false can that statement get?

Also on that video the frame welding looks to be manual which would be an indication of steel frames because aluminium is difficult to weld by hand and is best done by robots. So it looks like they produce some steel bikes and likely buy in the aluminium frames. Most factories with welding robots are proud to show them. You can see its a fairly small factory with limited automation.

It reminds me of the Decathlon situation. I remember wondering how they designed a frame with a wierd geometry which looked so weak and likely to fail and the reality later on was it was horrifically weak and very dangerous. Decathlon had designed their frame and got it made in China which was nothing like the Chinese factories own designs and the frames were failing all the time and there has been a huge recall of about 4 years of production of the bikes. Sometimes its better not to be too creative and go with some old style over-engineering and proven designs.



Decathlon Recalls 2012-2016 E-Bikes - Bike Europe