Thursday 27 September 2018 12:20 pm  |  Updated:  Tuesday 02 July 2019 3:17 pm

Brompton Electric review: The iconic folding bike gains a motor, but loses some portability along the way

By: Steve Hogarty

The Brompton is a magical object. The most popular bike in Britain, it appears to defy several laws of physics when it folds in on itself, collapsing like a neutron star into the size of something approaching a sugar cube.

The compact format of a Brompton means it can go places other bicycles aren’t allowed, such as trains, tube carriages, under your desk and inside cloakrooms. With 45,000 of them produced last year, Bromptons are as familiar a sight on London roads as red buses and flattened pigeon corpses.

So iconic is the London manufactured cycle that it’s taken years of careful engineering for Brompton to finally launch its first electric model, with a brief that seems to have been to retain the silhouette of the bike at all costs. And so the Brompton Electric is unmistakably still a Brompton. The battery occupies the slot on the handlebar’s luggage clip, and the electric motor sits inside the front wheel hub, rather than in the back where you’d expect it to be.

This gives the Brompton Electric peculiar handling for anyone trading down from a full-frame electric bike, like switching from rear-wheel drive to front-wheel drive car. It pulls rather than pushes, and delivers power in a deliberately timid way. Whereas most bikes dump all their torque into the motor as soon as possible, to blast you off from a standing start, the Brompton is more ponderous, kicking in seconds after you begin pedalling. It’s the electric bike equivalent of a partner who only offers to help out with the dishes once you’re halfway through the pots.

This light touch is a conscious design decision. The idea is that the bike should handle in a way that’s familiar to a Brompton rider first, and an electric bike rider second. As you begin to accelerate under your own steam, the motor gauges how best to take on the effort, and kicks in only where it’s needed. The assistance is most felt when cruising along at a constant speed, and on a flat gradient. On steep hills the bike can lurch, and feels reluctant to help much beyond keeping you upright. Perhaps this is a reflection of the mindset of the fiercely independent and proud Brompton rider, who might feel emasculated by the unwelcome sensation of unearned thrust.

All electric bikes top out at the EU-mandated speed limit of 25km/h, after which the Juncker-fearing motor cuts out and leaves your meat-legs to handle any further acceleration. Whereas other bikes can reach this upper limit suddenly – which gives a sensation similar to dropping out of gear in a car – the Brompton Electric brings you up to top speed more gradually, slowly reducing assistance as you approach it.

It’s certainly a smoother ride, but one that feels sluggish to an ebike rider more used to cruising in that lazy sweet spot just under the motor’s top speed. The result is a slower bike. My half hour commute took on average five minutes longer. That’s a total of ten minutes per day I could have spent looking at tweets and thinking about death.

The Brompton Electric feels retrofitted rather than innovative, and is hamstrung by the all too precious goal of making it identifiable as a Brompton.

It doesn’t help that the thing is so damn heavy. With the battery attached, the six-speed Brompton Electric weighs in at a 17.4kg. That’s 70 per cent heavier than the one-piece carbon fibre Hummingbird Electric, the lightest foldable electric bike on the market and, at £4,500, Brompton’s more expensive rival. Three kilos of that weight is in the battery, which boasts a far greater range than the Hummingbird Electric – I could go an impressive 35-40 miles on a single charge – but most would trade in at least half that range for a lighter bike.

With the Electric, Brompton has sacrificed some basic function in favour of maintaining the bike’s globally recognisable form. At this weight, it becomes simply too cumbersome to carry while folded, relying on its little trolley wheels to be moved any significant distance.

The Hummingbird Electric made good on the promise of a truly portable, light, folding ebike, something that took back-to-basics ingenuity and expensive materials to achieve. The Brompton Electric feels retrofitted rather than innovative, and is hamstrung by the all too precious goal of making it identifiable as a Brompton.

The manufacturer has succeeded in creating a Brompton with boost, but hasn’t designed an ebike that’s truly worthy of the brand. It needs to be lighter, but moreover it needs to be more balls-out powerful than this. Let’s hope a Mark II is in the works.

From £2,595, brompton.com

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