One of the reasons for the Birdy’s loyal following is the suspension – arguably the cleverest and most effective system fitted to any folding bike. On the other hand, the bike has many loyal converts – mostly occasional rail users who simply can’t live with the more upright Brompton.We suspect you will know very quickly whether the Birdy is for you. Birdy does offer a taller, height-adjustable ‘comfort’ stem as an option, but it adds weight, cost and folding complication, so if you really don’t like the ‘bum in the air’ position, a Birdy probably isn’t for you.
More comfortable riding upright bikes, we hated it, but anyone familiar with drop bars and head-down white line chasing will feel right at home. On the road, the bars are very low, a feature you will either love or hate. Obviously, it’s no heavyweight, but it wins no special awards in the weight department either. By way of comparison, the much cheaper (well, £830) Birdy Red weighed 12kg when we tested it back in December 1999 with much the same accessory pack.The Black weighs a little less than the similarly equipped Brompton ‘T’ type, and probably a little more than a Bike Friday built to this sort of spec. Admittedly, the Black is fitted with the optional rear rack and mudguards, but it’s also a relatively expensive model and generally considered to be the lightest in the range. It might come as something of a surprise then, to find that our test bike weighs 11.7kg (25.8lb) – almost as much as the Oyama featured on page 20. The Birdy frame is of chunkily-crafted aluminium throughout, and almost everything hung off it is light alloy too, with the exception of nuts and bolts, saddle rails, and a few other bits. Designed and marketed by Riese & Müller in Germany, the bikes are manufactured by Pacific in Taiwan – hardly a cut- price producer these days, of course, so all those sea-miles and middle-men add what economists laughingly call ‘value’.To buy our Birdy Black, with a few modest accessories, would cost the innocent consumer no less than £1,323.īirdy front coil spring and polymer suspension - the whole lot hinges round and back when folded Birdy Blackįor those unfamiliar with the genre, the Birdy was launched in late 1994 as a competitor to the already long-established Brompton. Why should anyone bother buying a heavier and much more expensive product from Europe or the USA when the Chinese are making similar things for a third of the price? That all depends on what the pricier bikes have to offer.The Brompton is still unbeatably compact and the Bike Friday and Airnimal provide a quality ‘big bike’ feel that would be hard to match, but what of the Birdy? We’ll run through the pros and cons of spending £1,250 on a bike that’s essentially unchanged, after a production run of ten years or so. No doubt they are, and we know new products are under development, but the ‘old world’ bikes are starting to look a little jaded. In a world where Dahon now produces the lightest folders and Oyama can sell a reasonable sports machine for just £350, you’d think the traditional Western manufacturers – Brompton, Birdy and Bike Friday – would be watching their backs.
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