Comments on: Roundup: Reviews of various family transport bikes

By: DrMekon

DrMekon — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:59:55 +0000

If it”s any help, if the Nihola is too small, I found the bakfiets.nl trike to be more stable than the Christiania or the Winther Kangaroo, particularly if you place the kids in the rear facing seats. We’ve been delighted with ours, and on top of the school run, make weekly 25-30km trips in it. The extra space means it’s much more flexible than the cargobike(s) we’ve had before. The downside is that it’s slower for equivalent effort (about 2kph slower on average), but we have no problem on hills, as we’ve just geared it very, very low.

Review here – http://is.gd/G3IEOu

By: Schoolrunmum

Schoolrunmum — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 14:25:00 +0000

Hello Henry,
Thank you for this very informative read. I’ve just started a gruelling school run and struggling to get there on time on foot. We are considering getting a trike. We were very hopeful of the Babboe until we found your website and also we test drove it today. It seemed quite unstable and a bit odd to steer. It does come with a lot of useful extra’s though. The other one we were considering is the Nihola. I wondered what your thoughts were (or anyone elses for the matter). Its such a lot of money.

Any guidance, much appreciated.

By: henry

henry — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:17:03 +0000

Tom,
Thanks for the real world feedback. Concerning Babboe upgrades: We do this all the time in our workshops. Of course the modifications aren’t cheap but they improve the bike greatly.

1. The rear wheel with unreliable Sturmey Archer hub, cheap rim and spokes that break: We replace the rear wheel with one from the Fr8 or Cargobike (almost the same) with very HD rim and strong stainless spokes. The hub is preferably a Shimano 8sp with coaster brake – much handier in a trike.

2. The nonfunctional front brakes and exploding front wheels: We replace both front wheels and entire brake system: Same rims and spokes as above with Shimano roller brakes. The cables are replaced with special, compressionless linear housing and stainless wires. Each brake gets its own cable pulled by a double cable lever, thus no fussy, frictiony cable splitter.

3. The Babboe’s frequent flat tires are generally caused by the wheels falling apart thus poking the loose spokes into the inner tubes. Above wheel replacements solve puncture problems too.

But if you really want to keep your existing hub and just replace the rim and spokes that’s also possible. We have good rims and can custom cut stainless 13g spokes to fit. The rim size is 26″ (559mm BSD). Then you’ll have to have somebody lace it up and install it locally. Figure about €45 for the parts plus post. Just contact Workcycles if you want to do that: info@workcycles.com

By: Tom Servo

Tom Servo — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 13:17:05 +0000

FWIW, I’ve had a Babboe big for 3 years here in the UK. Paid £800 for it, and bought as it was half the price of competitive offerings here. For what it does, it is a no frills option, and I like the large box on the front rather than the 2 wheel bikes out there for carrying shopping around with the kids.
My reservations are that it is a very heavy ride, and you can’t “stamp” on the pedals to get it up a hill, so is slow. My main concern is the really poor nuts/bolts – I’m constantly having to tighten them and they regularly fall out, and the rear wheel is very poor quality – buckled really easily and the spokes are poor. If anyone can help by telling me what size the wheel is so I can get a replacement rather than stump up the £100 babbow want for a replacement I’d be grateful – as well as any tips on replacing it regarding keeping the drum brakes/SRAM gears etc.

It’s an OK bike for the money, no more no less. You get what you pay for and I didn’t want to pony up an additional £800 for a better bike so I live with its faults.

And Babboe staff – stop shilling here. It’s doing you no favours.

By: BikeBike

BikeBike — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:27:26 +0000

We have sold a handful of the Babboe Big and City and we have not seen any of the alignment issues mentioned by a previous poster or the low quality boxes mentioned by another. I can only guess that Babboe have been updating their design as they go along.

North America is just now starting to understand what cargo bikes can do and, IMO, are starting to appreciate what good quality cargo bikes cost and why. We have been open for just under 2 years now and are noticing our customers are just now looking for bikes like the Nihola, Christiania, and Workcycles – generally more expensive designs.

The only other thing I’d say is that getting access to higher end cargo bikes is not easy for a small retailer and as such, makes it very difficult to stock them. We sell about a dozen cargo bikes a year and I think that makes us one of the bigger cargo bike shops in Canada.

Perhaps European cargo bike manufacturers could get more aggressive at getting their bikes into the North American market?

Great discussion!

By: henry

henry — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 18:21:29 +0000

Nomik,
Given that Babboe is busy leaving fake comments on other people’s sites (see above) I can only assume they’re doing the same on their own site. Probably they “moderate” away negative comments, leaving only the abstract criticism you refer to.

By: Nomik

Nomik — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 15:53:24 +0000

Why is it that the anti-Babboe posts are only on this site?
The Babboe site has an open comments section and the customers are raving over their purchases.
Also, the criticisms of Babboe on this site are always of an abstract nature – comments about frame balance and other factors that the average person would never notice. How about giving us some real emperical evidence of poor quality!

By: henry

henry — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 07:41:38 +0000

Michael,
Thanks for the story and kind words. One point that comes up repeatedly here in our discussions with customers and dealers is that good utility bikes are only expensive from our rather warped and unsustainable perspective of products made in enormous quantities under questionable conditions in low-wage countries. Yes, it does initially seem weird that a good city bike should cost €1000 when you can buy a perfectly good working DVD player for €39 or a similar looking bike for €199. That’s just economics. If we could lower our prices to more effectively compete in the market we’d certainly do so.

But let’s ignore those meaningless comparisons since if one needs a solid, dependable, family-compatible bike to ride daily, that €199 bike isn’t going to help much. Nor will the €39 DVD player. You can either buy a good new bike for what it costs or search out a suitable second hand bike if possible.

So is bike for €500 or €1000 or €2000 too expensive? Firstly it’s a super competitive market where brand status plays a minimal role, so there’s generally a pretty close relationship between price and quality. That’s where the Babboe story they keep trying to force down our throats above goes wrong; The Babboe City looks like a lot of bike for €900ish but that’s just not enough to actually build a good bakfiets. There are no exceptions to the laws of economics as we so vividly saw when the dot com bubble crashed a decade ago.

Secondly I argue that, if the bike is important, €1000 or even €2000 is actually quite affordable for the majority of people who’d ride these bikes in the developed world. Yes it seems like a chunk of change but how many people pour that much fuel into their cars every few months, spend as much in two years on mobile phone contracts or remodel their kitchens for five or ten times as much?

Riding my wife’s Cargobike last week I was thinking about how indispensable it was to us, how much joy it has facilitated both in riding around town and doing our little tours with the kids over the last three years. In short we cannot imagine our life without it. Had we been paying retail prices the bike and accessories would have cost about €2000. It’s had several little services and one bigger one a couple months ago. All totaled we’d have spent about €2300 over three years. That’s €767/year, €64/month or €2/day. That seems pretty darn affordable to me.

By: Martijn

Martijn — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 00:23:38 +0000

We are using the Babboe City for over 4 months in a family of five in Belgium. I sincerely regret not having paid more for a decent bakfiets. I second all the experiences of Friedrich and then some. The frame is its weakest point; heavy, flexing, divided midway (!) in two parts through a very dubious connection. The first bike received was impossible to assemble due to misaligned fixation points at this central connection. The second frame part received free of charge did fit, but the serious misalignment in the rear frame part remains. I feel the ride as heavy and unstable, only the two-wheeled Johnny Loco rode more indirect. We have had flat tires every month – rims repeatedly cut the inside tires. The geometry of the rear luggage rack is pitiful: a very unstable design. I could go on. With all thinkable accessories we spent around 1000 euro. The missus was, and is, won over by the design, while I remain frustrated by the many hours of maintenance it already took to keep this bike on the road. Attractive design without the right technical underpinnings realized through cheap Chinese manufacturing: a lifestyle bike sums it up nicely. .

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 05:43:44 +0000

Pardon me; typo. Meant to say, cheap bikes others make, not Henry’s. A last thought; Americans have just forgot, for a generation, that bicycles are pragmatic and fun at the same time. There live on a US aircraft carrier more people than live in the town where I reside–and we are considered the “big town” within a radius of 60 miles. The main issue for Henry’s company is, truly, building the best damn bicycle in the World. That sells. It’s not the mass market, but if you see the Wal-Mart 60 miles from me, where the bicycle racks three stacks high are now cleared, it is obvious there is a market for high quality bicycles once the People figure it out. And they will, especially when they have steady jobs and disposable income.