Duragrouch

(above) Giant had the Halfway, the first folding bike I ever saw. Single-sided forks front and rear, so easy flat fixing even on rear in the field. However, required their own special cantilevered rack in the rear, and the bike was heavy. Glad I didn't buy one at the price of $600 I think at the time. I could not have modified it like my Dahon Speed to be like a 2X Bike Friday with full racks.

Trakhak

Interesting reasoning. Following your line of thought, none of the major manufacturers offer titanium bikes. They all have CF bikes that top out at stratospheric prices, so it's not because titanium bikes are too expensive. If there were a huge advantage to titanium bikes, they would sell them, but they don't. Therefore, there's no reason to consider buying one.

Most or all of the major brands selling bikes in the U.S. had true touring bikes, track bikes, tandems, women-specific bikes, and recumbents in their lineups at one time or another. Why did they all drop them? Because those varieties didn't sell in the numbers that would have justified their remaining in the catalog. The big manufacturers are not in the business of providing niche products. They cede that territory to the small manufacturers.

veganbikes

Fair dinkum but titanium is more of a frame material and Salsa and other QBP brands have/had titanium in their line up. Lynskey, Litespeed, Moots and other also sell them quite extensively.

Trakhak

The analogy, to make it even clearer:

You said, in effect, that if folding bikes were worth considering, major bike manufacturers would offer them.

I said that it therefore logically follows that if titanium bikes were worth considering, major bike manufacturers would offer them.. They don't, so they aren't. By your logic.

Per your list above: as I said, the major manufacturers cede the niche products to the small manufacturers.

Ron Damon

The analogy: My understanding of folding bikes stems grom major manufacturers not selling them. Non sequitur.

veganbikes

Nope did not say that Ron, sorry. I never said my understanding stems from major manufacturers but thanks for playing all of our contests will get the home game. My knowledge of folding bikes comes from selling them, working on them, riding them and doing research on them as a professional in the industry and a bike nerd.

You can read what I wrote before. However I will ceed that sure major manufacturers don't always make all the products that is fair I don't wholly disagree with Trakhak but still you would think they would have done it at some point as they pointed out manufacturers did a lot of different bikes but generally folding bikes weren't in the mix.

Trakhak

FYI, a number of major manufacturers sold folding bikes in the past or currently sell them, including Schwinn, Raleigh, Bianchi, and Giant. It's a bit surprising that a bike store guy didn't know that.

Also, where you wrote "ceed" (which isn't a word but can be a suffix), you meant "concede." "Cede" has a different meaning.

veganbikes

Schwinn and Raleigh are very much different companies now and the Raleigh twenty is quite old and I don't recall any newer ones but yes I did mention Giant in my earlier post though did miss Bianchi but I think like Raleigh it was quite a while ago that they did a folder. However the big three these days Trek, Specialized and Cannondale haven't as far as I can remember.

Yes I did mean "cede" I was looking at it and did realize it looked off but didn't show a spelling mistake so I let it go.

Trakhak

Apology accepted.

And again, you meant "concede," not "cede." Different meanings.

veganbikes

Thanks : )

I mean yes and no cede is give up territory so my usage was not far off. I could use concede as well but I did intend cede in that sense. I guess one could argue that cede is maybe slightly inappropriate in the context but not totally out of line.

Duragrouch

In many industries in the past, once something was innovated, many major manufacturers jumped right into the same market. These days, I think the majors consider more carefully if they can do it better AND at bare minimum, if it is profitable. Recumbents are a good example, after they started to catch on, both Trek and Cannondale offered some, but not for long. Right now and the past few years, especially during the pandemic, I expected to be a skyrocketing time for folders, and may have happened, but others have stated that ebikes totally interrupted that. Couple that with low priced competitors like Zizzo and Origami, et al, plus established brands like Dahon and Tern at the higher more-profitable end of the market, and them specializing in folders, and I think the majors decided that was too big a lift, unless those folder companies started to go after core customers of the majors, which so far they haven't. So my point is, it's not for lack of success or validity of folders, it's just that the majors and the folders have each decided to stay in their lanes, it seems to me.

With electric cars, different story. First Toyota tread the path with the Prius hybrid, then others, and then Tesla went all the way with full electric, and to paraphrase a movie, "(They are) DAN-GER-OUS!" The gauntlet was thrown, all the big makers knew they had to move to full electric in the long term or they would die.

Sometimes you're late to the game; Airbus debuted the A380 super-jumbo just as that market was in decline, and Boeing knew it, deciding instead to concentrate on more economical large twin-jets. The only reason the 747 stayed in production as long as it did is because of the drastic increase in air freight, which the 747 was designed for from the get-go, because Boeing thought they would be supplanted in 10 years by SSTs, so they planned for all passenger 747s to be freighters in the long run. Didn't happen. Airbus didn't design the A380 for freight. It ended production even before the 747, which was in production for 54 years IIRC.