berlinonaut

Maybe you should give it a second look. I recently hat a chat with a friend who works as a Brompton mechanic about exactly that topic and we came to the surprising conclusion that a 1998 and 2018 Brompton do not share any identical part apart from possibly the standard and longer seatpost and maybe the hinge pin. Everything else is different, to the tiniest bolt and has changed at least once. Still almost everything is backwards compatible.

Well: You could get a carbon seat post for the Brompton from a company in the UK already in the early 2000s. They invented their titanium models back in 2005. And instead of using all their creativity and abilities to build a better folder than the 40 year old British thingy those Asian chaps, with all the technology available today, get no better as to copy the bike in a miserable way or to create bling for it that adds no real advantage but weight and cost and even lowers the reliability. Nobody seems to have missed it until recently the Asians turned up as customers. A different view on the topic and as strange, wrong and weird as your argument.

And still you want one. And the Asian markets are the ones with the highest growth rate for Brompton. Strange, isn't it?