The End is Near for Brompton — 3 Bikes Still Worth Buying (11.2025)
I am recording this video as Brumton’s slide to downhill continues. I’m going to explain to you in this video why I think that the company is finished. The original products that we liked so much are running out of time. And the main point behind this video is to show you which models are still worth buying because they still have those classic values that made Brumton so precious to so many people around the world. So that this company was able to sell over a million units. Something probably Birdie and Molton cannot say. But unfortunately, everything that we appreciate about the bike, the extreme reliability and sturdiness, the extreme compactness, the interchangeability of components between models, and the huge third-party support, those are all fading away. But before I continue, I should spend a few seconds on my newly updated website. You can click the link below to go there. And notice that I have a new panel here. This is going to be for learning and I’m going to be adding more stuff here. I have a new ebike masterass video course that runs about 2 hours. It goes into the topic in depth. You can purchase this course by clicking one of these buttons. Either it’s going to be PayPal or Stripe. And I also have my maximum BMTON book which follows the story of how I built my project which now you can get for free. You just send me an email and I will send you a PDF version of this book. This is an awful lot of quality information for nothing. If you are a Kindle addict, of course, you can still click on the Amazon button and go to Amazon and download it for a few bucks, but I think it would be better to get it for free. I would get your email and I’m not going to bother you too much with emails but I would like you to be on my list. If you don’t care for getting a book then you can just join the list up here. You can also contact me here and I am on social media all over the place. So this is the main site or landing page from which you can reach me everywhere where I have a presence on media. So let’s start with the very beginning. I just open up the Brmpton site and I see all these ugly bikes. What the hell is this? This was the bike that so many people fell in love with. Number one, it looked absolutely classically beautiful in an understated way. Look at this arch. This simple, elegant, continuous arch, which took a while, by the way, to achieve for Andrew Richie. Because if you look at the very beginning, the earliest Brmptons were pretty ugly with a crease in the frame. It took years to achieve this. There’s another elegant uh curve here. It’s just elegant understated curves all over the place. And then they come with this thing that looks like it’s been in an accident. The front wheel crashed into somebody. It is also humongous. The compactness of the bike is gone. and the front fork. It’s no longer a sturdy handbuilt fork, which could take my 750 W installation of an overclock green electric kit. I describe how I built it in the book. It’s also in my ebike masterclass course with a bunch of other info. Of course, Brmpton is selling electric versions of this bike, which is a good thing. But the front fork is not only ugly, it’s not only machinemade, it is so weak that you can’t even attach a 250 W motor to it. So they move the motor to the back, which means all the power is in the back and the all-wheel drive aspect of it is now gone. But let me take it piece by piece. First of all, as you can see, this approach of sticking these modern looking forks onto a classical frame is spreading onto the other models. This is not the titanium line for which this ugly fork was originally developed, but they are sticking it onto classic frame with clear coat and polish. I’m not crazy about the design of the titanium, but this is even worse. I mean, this is really a horrible idea. It looks like somebody’s homemade job. Somebody broke a fork and they couldn’t find the fitting fork and they fit something from another manufacturer onto it. There’s also a new stirring column. I don’t object to it, but it’s not colored to match the rest of the frame. In fact, it doesn’t even match the seat post. So, you have two treatments here. the frame, the seat post, plus now there is a third one that doesn’t even look like any of these shiny objects. So this is the direction in which Brmpton is going. And what is going to happen is they are going to bring that primitive aluminum fork. The fork that you see here, it’s going to be moved over here as well along with this new not so attractive steering column. And the fork is not handmade. It’s not high quality. It’s rather primitive looking. The paint jobs are also getting cheaper and cheaper. So that’s going to be stuck onto the front of this classic frame. And the idea is to eventually probably replace the whole thing with some machine manufactured aluminum structure. And the problem with that is that that is cutting into turn territory already. This kind of electrification which is inferior to what you see on turn. It’s not like you are getting a Bosch center drive. It’s not like you have electronic brake regeneration. You are lower quality bicycle that is no longer really handmade. And of course, the components are no longer interchangeable. The Brmpton is now full of all kinds of different parts and different things that don’t go together. There’s nothing that this bike, the Gline, has in common with the classic frame. And there’s nothing either of them have in common with the current titanium frame. What can you get before Brumton completely goes down and ends up competing against turn and getting wiped out? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Or if they get wiped out in World War II, which is also getting hotter by the week. If there’s any kind of a shootout in Europe, London and the surrounding area are nuclear targets. The Russians can reach most of the capitals of the European powers within less than 10 minutes from their base in Kernigburg. But either way, the Bmpton company is not on the right track and if they continue, I think it’s going to be a complete disaster. I recommend three bikes that are worth getting from them. The number one bike is definitely the cheapest one. It’s about $1,300. If you’re getting it in the US, about the,000 British pounds. This is the classic Brumton the way we always had it. It’s very basic. You’re not getting even mud guards. You do get a hubgear in the rear, which is actually tremendous value for the money you are paying. You’re paying very little money here. And you’re getting the classic steel frame, which is going to last for the rest of your life. And if you take care of it, you can give it to your grandson. He can also ride it for decades longer. The hubge gear is much better. It’s much more weather resistant than an external derailer system with the cassette. And for the most part, you’re not getting any mud guards. You’re not getting anything fancy. But those are areas that you want to build out anyway. You don’t want the cheap aluminum mud guards that come with so many of the Brmptons. In fact, almost all of them. It’s better to buy your own. I have my carbon fiber mud guards which cost me about 100 bucks. For a little bit more, you can even have handmade very classy looking wooden mud guards which would look so great with this frame. Or you can ride it without the mud guards. If if you don’t ride in inclement weather or in dusty muddy areas, then you might be able to get away with it. You get a very compact, very simple transportation solution that looks very classy. It has the classic Brumton curves and it’s very compact, very easy to maintain because this hubge gear is going to last for a long time before it needs any kind of cleaning or replacement and you only have a few wires. There’s one wire that goes back into the gear and another one that goes back into the brake and there’s the front brake. That’s it. So much easier and simpler than more complicated systems such as the ones that have a dual gear system. For example, on the 12 gear configuration, they have both a hubge gear as well as an external cassette gear, which is a maintenance nightmare in my opinion. So, keep it simple. If you want more gear range, you can upgrade this thing into a five gear steri archer, which some people claim would fit if you only have a single cog. So, there’s no external cassette. You just have a single cog and you have a much bigger, much wider range hubge gear. But even this basic 3-speed is really not bad. The second one worth getting this is more of a higher end BMPton. And of course the price is accordingly. This is going to be in US is going to be over $3,000. But the thing is this is the old titanium frame. These parts, the extremities are actually titanium. And they do shave a couple of pounds off the total weight. The total weight, and you can get it in so many different colors, which I also like. The weight of the steel frame is about 25 lb. This one takes it down to about 23 lb. You shave off a pound with each extremity that’s made of titanium. And the paint jobs are decent. You don’t get that ugly flat dark gray that you would be getting with the new titanium frames. You are also not paying $6,000. I mean, you are paying half the money. And I noticed that different colors have different prices. So, apparently this deep purple color is a premium color, so you pay a little bit of extra money for it. But the thing is, you can spend a few hundred extra dollars, replace the seat post with a titanium or even carbon fiber equivalent, shave a half pound off or maybe a pound, I don’t know how much, and you can replace the stirring column also with a titanium equivalent. So, you can actually lighten it even further. It’s never going to go down to the 17 or 18 pounds that the Brumton full titanium frame would give you, but it’s also not going to cost nearly as much. And leaving the top tube steel is going to ensure that this most important hinge is not going to be compromised. It is going to last the rest of your life. This bike as light as it already is when you buy it. And it can get even a couple of pounds lighter when you upgrade certain components as I mentioned. Also, the the handlebar can be changed into titanium. So, you can get it down from about 23 lb to at least 21. If you get sexy carbon fiber rims, you might be able to get down to 20 lb only. That’s only a couple of pounds heavier than the Brmpton titanium frame. and you are getting something that is so much more elegantl looking, infinitely more elegantl looking and sexier than the Brmpton TI. If you want inspiration, just check out the large number of shorts I have posted in the past and I keep on posting more showing you some of the projects that other people have built out of the classic frame and they are some of them are absolutely mindblowing. Finally, here is the electric Brmpton as it is on the US market today. Remember, this is the one that they are going to convert into this with the controller taken out of the bag, pushed into the back. The motor is going to be in the back and you are going to have not this fork, but the primitive titanium fork, this fork attached to it, which is going to be really ugly. It’s going to be at least as ugly as this, possibly even uglier. So, why am I suggesting that you should get this one? Well, number one, obviously, it’s much more attractive as a bike. The front bag is vertical, which makes this Promune one of the most attractive ones for me with a bag. The problem with the big bags is most of them are wider than they are tall, and that creates a sort of a brick-like aesthetic. So, it looks something like this. And this this is really not very attractive. But making it elongated, making it a tall and narrow bag is not only more aerodynamic, but it is just a better looking bag. And with this classical light at the bottom, I think it looks really good. But beyond just the appearance of it, this is an all-wheel drive bicycle. I’m not crazy about the 15 mph speed limit, which according to Gossip Brmpton intends to change to 20 so that it would suit the US market better. And I think that’s a good idea. But the new electrics are going to have all the power applied in the back, which is not good. You want to apply some of it in the front so that you have an all-wheel drive bicycle. That means if you hit a sandy, muddy or slippery patch and you would lose control on one wheel, you still have some control on the other. So you may not fall. You may be able to drag or push yourself out of the situation. And all-wheel drive configuration is always better. Look at cars, even racing cars. Everybody is moving in the direction of all-wheel drive systems. And the reason for this is this that you have much better control and grip on the road in hazardous circumstances or even in an accident. Now the other thing is the weight. Pushing all the power into the rear is also putting most of the weight in the rear because even though the new electrics are going to have the battery mounted in the front, this motor, which is going to be pretty heavy, is going to go into the back. So all the weight is going to go into the back. and your weight obviously as you sit on it is going to be toward the back as well. So there’s hardly any weight in the front and I think that’s really bad. One of the best part for me of transferring from a Birdie to a Brmpton was that with the bag in the front and especially with the electric kit, the weight distribution improved so much. There’s a reason why BMW claims that all of their models have a 50/50 weight distribution. That’s the same thing with every single one of the top end sports cars. They all have either 50/50 or very close to that kind of weight distribution because if you make the rear heavy, you’re going to have trouble around corners and just keeping your balance. So, these are the three models I recommend. If you want an electric, the time to get it is now before they have the new one coming in. you want an electric with the front motor, not with the new configuration. If you want the titanium, I would go for the Pline. And if you want to make it lighter than it already is, you can certainly do so by upgrading a few components for a few hundred. It’s not going to go up to $67,000 like you have it from Brmpton. And you’re going to have a much better looking, much sturdier, and more reliable ride. And finally, if you just want to get into the game at the low end, you really can’t go wrong with the cheapest model. The cheapest model is the so-called A-ine. Obviously, it’s just the basics, but you can upgrade with high quality components, and you’re not losing much because what you’re replacing is very cheap stuff anyway. Obviously, if you get upgrades, you should still sell off the original wheels and gears on the used market because you can get some money back. So, these are my recommendations. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for Brumton to really hit rock bottom. But despite all the critical videos, mostly from me, it looks like they are not changing direction. They are heading headlong into the abyss. And I don’t think there’s any turning back. These are really your last chances to gain access to a classic before the Bronton shops are going to be filled with this. I’ll be back. [Music]
Shop Here: https://s2w-shop.com
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Recommended Videos:
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Products in Video:
https://www.brompton.com/p/1029/a-line-23
https://www.brompton.com/p/827/p-line-urban-23
https://www.brompton.com/p/1092/electric-c-line-explore-12-speed
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