A new bike has been recently introduced which is designed with the goals of products in the 1960s-- rugged, simple, built to last. Nothing is flimsy on this bike. Even the fenders and sprockets are thick. The design focus was two main goals: robustness and simplicity so owners can fix it themselves. The gears are internal, which seems to reflect ruggedness being prioritized over self-repairability. Derailers are inherently fragile and cassettes wear down relatively quickly and also would impose a thin chain. The internal gears enable the chain to be thick and wide.
The website is in French but I machine-translated the “about” section:
A Bruxellois, magnet to travel by bicycle in town, activist in several environmental associations and working in the design and manufacture of cycles since 2014, established the SUGG srl in 2021 to provide simple, solid, practical, fast, fun, designed and assembled bicycles in Brussels with high quality components often produced in Europe.
The SUGG bikes are aimed at young people from 9 to 99 years of age who wish to move by bike without assistance and prefer to exploit the powerful resources often ignored whose nature has given them. Indeed, with no electric assistance, SUGG bikes are more economical, light, ecological, simple, reliable, durable and fun. At SUGG, the efficiency and ascent qualities of the bike are optimized by the choice of geometry and components. It’s fun!
A few objectives of SUGG: to contribute to the improvement of life in our cities thanks to less air and noise pollution, calm and friendly streets, intelligent and respectful traffic, efficient, beautiful and funny movements; to participate in the fight against unemployment in our regions, on the one hand by repatriating the design and assembly in us and on the other hand by procuring the parts with manufacturers not too far away from us
I don’t have one myself but if I wanted a bomb-proof bike that would last my whole life, this is probably what I would get.
To be clear I think only the stem folds and the seat post lowers. The rest of the frame is rigid but small. I think he tried to keep the body roughly not much longer than a scooter so you can easily carry it up stairs. I guess the idea is that it’s small enough that it doesn’t need to be folded in a lot of situations.