Aluminum Brompton...rumor.

The confusion might have something to do with that wretched hive of scum and villiany called "watch collecting."

Counterfeit, replica, knockoff - copies trademarked branding, illegal, bad, could have product rightfully confiscated by customs.
Copy, "homage" - pretty much a design copy, down to some details, but different branding. Legal; owners of the real-deal may think less of those who purchase them.
True homage - has details with a nod to something someone else did in the past, but visually different in any number of details.
"Re-issue" - when a Big Company copies one of their own designs.

Brompton won a copyright case, because some idiot vendor copied their sales copy. Not because they made a bike exactly like a Brompton. Since their patent has expired, they might have recourse over trade dress, if they can convince judge/jury that the shape or mechanism of their fold constitutes essentially a trademark, but they need to have registered that IP in order to make that claim. Design patents offer even less time for protected sale than regular patents, however. And really, they can go after official distributors in the US and Europe, but in most of the rest of the world, including mail order to US/EU, it would be expensive and pretty much tilting at windmills, to argue their case.

There are those who argue that copies are certainly unethical, borderline illegal. OTOH, copies are absolutely legal, and the ethics should be viewed in light of why there are limits on IP.

As noted in previous posts, they have tried to do this twice...and failed twice, in 2017 (Dahon) and 2019-2023 (Chedech).

The proliferation of Brompton clones out of Asia isn't going to fold up and go away any time soon. There are aluminum frame models, all-titanium models, trifolds with 20" wheels, titanium frame bikes with 20" wheels, and 6-, 7-, 8-, and 9-speed derailleur models. Right now the East is the Wild West of Brompton cloning.

I liked this all-titanium, 7-speed, 16" Leggero:

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...00d400a944.png


No promises about it helping you get a date, though.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...4ddc9ad549.png

What is a pity with many of those clones is that even if the several weak points of the Brompton are very well known, their stupid manufacturers anyway copied everything even those weak points that a single man small factory like Kinetics Glasgow easily solved!

For the titanium frame clones, in most cases, unlike Brompton, their manufacturer just changed the material without doing any re-dimensioning of the frame to take into account the difference in material properties between steel and titanium.

At the end of the day, most clones manufacturers, just like Brompton (with the exception of the new T-line), do not innovate at all.

The only manufacturer who really tried to make the excellent Brompton trifiold concept evolve is Dahon with the Curl but the evolution is a little bit messy with features that appear and disappear from one iteration to the next.