BikeRadar is at the Eurobike exhibition, and reports this morning on a new bicycle from Cannondale
...the Hooligan, a small-wheeled, hub geared urban machine that looks like the bastard offspring of a BMX and a Moulton.
It sounds weird but it might just work. Those small wheels will give you excellent acceleration (ideal for urban riding) and a long wheel base should make for stable and predictable handling, the hub gears mean low maintenance, and the burly frame certainly looks tough enough to cope with city streets - we shall see, we've already ordered one in for test.
Of course we all know that Moultons are pure breeds, and while it's vaguely possible that a frustrated early APB might fantasize about a dirty weekend with something classy like a Rivendell, it would certainly never mix it's genes with a BMX.
When you look at those fat tyres, only one thing comes to mind... the Raleigh RSW.
Fed up with newcomer Moulton selling so many bikes, Raleigh needed to hit back.
They badly needed to compete with the Moulton bicycle, but couldn't get around Moulton's suspension patents.
So they developed the RSW. At first glance it was vaguely similar to a Moulton. They used balloon tyres to get around the discomfort factor of unsuspended small wheels.
The RSW was inferior in every way to the Moulton. It was 6lbs heavier and felt like cycling through treacle. But it was cheaper to manufacture, so Raleigh could sell it more cheaply.
The unsuspecting customer, walking into a bike shop to buy a Moulton could easily be convinced to buy this thing that looked a lot like a Moulton, but was over 10% cheaper, and had Raleigh's name on it.
Neo-liberal mass market corporation's greedy marketing tactics win out over sound engineering shocker.
So is history about to repeat itself. I don't think so. Firstly, Alex Moulton is unlikely to sell his company to Cannondale, as he did to Raleigh in the 1960's.
But more importantly, the original Moulton was sold to the mass market, and so was vulnerable to mass market competition, and big bicycle manufacturers.
Today's Moultons are a very much specialised product for a niche market. People who buy Moultons are a very different segment of the market to the majority of the market: mountain bikes that never see a mountain, junk hybrids, supermarket bike shaped objects and tour de france clones.
