Originally Posted by
jpjuggler
I went to Local bike store that carries brompton.. the mechanic said bromptons are not engineered to handled power pulling from the front wheel. it damages the frame/folding point. I do not know if the mechanic was sharing credible info or not.
Electric conversion Kits for the Brompton exist roughly since the early 2000s and front-wheel ones for more than 10 years now from a variety of vendors. Alltogether I'd assume they must have sold thousands over the years. I've not yet heard of a fork or a frame braking on a converted Brompton.
Originally Posted by
jpjuggler
the mechanic also said that brompton is coming out with its own electric model and the whole bike was re-engineered to take pulling power from the front.....the brompton site for electric is uk only... nothing available in N. America......at this point,..
Indeed Brompton did some structural work on the bike frame and fork for their own electric conversion. Obviously 3rd parties cannot do that. Still it seems to be sufficiently robust. Brompton's factory electric bike got seriously delayed, for years and years, initially it was supposed to hit the shop floors in about 2010. In 2015 or 2016 Brompton stopped their dealers in Europe from selling 3rd party conversion kits to make room for the factory version, that slowly seems to hit the streets now in the UK and at some later point in time in the rest of the world. It probably has a bit of a higher quality level overall with an enforced frame and a torque sensor instead of a pedal sensor. I rode a prototype a while ago and it went nicely. But so do the conversion kits for a cheaper price. People using a conversion kit on their Brompton that I know are happy with it. For me more a question of taste and money than anything else.