lately I notice, that there's nothing new with folding bike design.
since around 4-5 years ago, I have had 3 types of dahon. 20" and 16" wheels. one taiwanese 16" by the brand of hasa.
and I see that the fold is just like decades ago. early dahons fold in half.
yes I understand, there's bike friday tikit, and brompton, birdy, carryme, strida that has come up with a different fold. but take a look around, there's not much new.
even tern as a newcomer doesn't come up with something ingenious.
aside from brompton that holds the record for compactness, or jifo or curl that tries so hard to imitate brompton, I have become bored.
anyone agree with me?

it's not easy to just "make up" a new fold because they felt like it. Brompton's fold was like 20+ years of tweaking and redesigning and to ignore bike friday, carryme, stridas and birdy's fold is basically ignoring a large portion of the "good" folders market. You might also forgot about the IF mode fold which was pretty ingenious too and well designed. Alot of the fold in halfs where basically using dahon's fold in half design which is probably also 20 years old of testing and tweaking. Smaller companies couldn't afford to make up a new fold, for someone to create a new folding pattern is easy on paper, but then to be able to guarantee that it will be safe and perfect the engineering and stress testing is an entirely different matter and very costly to design, one bad flaw and you are looking at lawsuits and recalls easily! That's a huge risk for most companies to make so you won't see that too often, smaller companies can go bankrupt with such a mistake.

On my new bike I see that its an older design, but it works just fine. I'm new to folding bikes, but would this not fit into two categories:

- If it works don't fix it.

- Why reinvent the wheel.

JMHO of course.

Cheers
Wayne

I'd say you're the exact opposite of smallwheeler... he gets excited over every minute nuance and variation of a bike's design. I'd love to overhear a conversation between you two.

Set a Raleigh 20 designed over 50 years ago beside my 2010 dahon speed tr. Same basic proven design.

Bike Friday's Tikit; following on from their Travel bikes, has some different approaches..

Like the pushing the saddle forward , through a cable entering the underside of the fork,

slacking, releases the handle bar clamp at it's hinge. a one step , 'hyperfold'.

made in more than one size frame, offering a customer Build to Order option.


Made in Oregon.. , Company will ship to Indonesia..

id rather have companies improve on a trusted design, than re invent the wheel with catastrophic results for the consumer in the long run.

Design school Student have offered radical ideas , but that is a long ways from getting capital and manufacturing

to make more than a Graduate Thesis Project Prototype, or a CAD image.

we see tons of folding designs from those students every year, some are neat and cool but 99.9% of them probably would never reach the manufacturing floor once they start sourcing for usable materials and testing for practicality and engineering stress points. The only one I know of that was successful was Mark Sanders and his strida model. He actually started that from scratch and if you followed his story you can see all the hundreds of tweaks and fixes he needed to do to his design to even make it practical for everyday use. Like Fietsbob was implying.... it's easy to have it on a CAD image, but much harder to get it into a working model.

little or nothing is really new.
I personally wish manufacturers would produce compacts with more specialist users. ie 16 inch wheeled bikes with drops, carbon, full suspension,
brompton and mezzo make basically one type of bike.
If i can make a drop bar brommie or a dual drive mezzo why dont manufactors try harder. I have friends that would love to buy something like my bikes, but are only willing to pay standard prices for them.
birdie is a full suspension bike i know, but it has issues as an easy folder.

Having just gone through the work of picking a folder I'd actually say that there's a ton of variation in folds and styles, from Montague's full-size big fold to Swift's hingeless frame to the Dahon/Tern style to Brompton's tiny little fold, to the Strida and A-frame and Carryme and Mobicky, to the clack-clack design of Bigfish. To say nothing of the IF Mode already mentioned, and of down-market versions of some of the above designs.

Each of these designs has trade-offs, but I don't think it's fair to say that there's no variation in folders. I actually feel like there's a daunting amount of variation.