The main difference is Bike Friday’s are hand built in the USA in various sizes or custom built to customer’s exact requirements (size, components & colour). Bike Friday do make a fast folding bike known as the tikit but most of their range are bikes designed to disassemble and fit into a suitcase for travel. Bike Friday are a company that really go out of their way to help their customers.
Dahon are a much bigger company building bikes in Taiwan. They make a lot of different folding bikes but generally offer no more than 1 or 2 colour choices and no options on components. There have been complaints about lack of customer support and very poor parts back-up.
Originally Posted by
kamtsa
I agree with PDR's comparison, especially on the support aspects.
Also, BF ride quality is superior to that of Dahon (stiffer frame, etc).
BTW, my son rides MuP24 and I ride BF New World Tourist.
Kam
+1.
And I would like to add some more insights to Dahon as I own 2 at present. Dahons are good bikes for riders who only ride from time to time. They are usually a "one size fits most" type that appeal to a general crowd that are not demanding or expect too much from bikes. If you are car light, no car, public transit dependent, ride all the time, want to keep the bike longer than a couple of years as Dahon proprietary parts become unavailable and/or obsolete after a couple of years, or similar reasons buy a better grade of bike. Do test ride
all bikes
before you buy and buy only quality bikes that you won't get tired of after a time. For serious riding listed above, I own a Brompton myself. The Dahons are for bad areas where I don't want to call attention to myself.