This is the Dahon K-One hub drive ebike.
Is this the best camping bike for me?
And more importantly, is this the best camping bike for you?
Hi, I'm Ben Coles from Camping with the Coles,
and today we're going to be looking into whether or not a folding bike
is the right type of bike for you and the way you do your camping adventures.
Dahon, is a company that's been around since 1982.
They're based in California, and they are the world's
largest manufacturer of folding bicycles.
I'll be completely upfront here.
Dahon has given me this bicycle to test out and to do a review on.
Now, they're not paying me for it.
They're not making me say good things about it.
I can say whatever I want about it.
I'm not getting any commission sales on it or anything.
So this is my honest opinion on this bike and generally folding bikes.
Now, in many of our travels, we've seen a lot of people riding folding bikes.
Now, I've never really considered it myself because I have a mountain bike.
Cheryl has an e-bike mountain bike, and we have a bike rack on the front of
our trailer that we just put the bikes on so we can take them with us.
A couple of friends of ours,
they came camping with us at Bonnechere and Lake Saint Peter.
They have a couple of folding bikes and it is an ideal thing for them.
They have a very small Trillium trailer
that they travel with and they tow it with a sport utility vehicle.
There's no bike rack at all, so they can easily fold up these bikes
and put them in the back of their sport utility.
The bikes that they have are from MEC, which is Mountain Equipment Co-op.
As I looked into it,
I found out that the MEC bikes are actually Dahon bikes with MEC badging.
So when Dahon contacted us about testing out one of these bikes, I thought, hmm,
I'm not really sure if it's exactly what we're looking for in a bike,
but I know it is something that a lot of people are looking for.
So we thought, you know what, let's try this thing out, see how we feel about it.
So that's what we're doing today.
As Cheryl and I discussed having a folding bike, a few things came up.
Number one, we only have a two bike bike rack.
And if one of our kids comes with us, in the past,
we've taken their bike and brought it in the trailer.
I really don't like having it in the trailer, though.
It could move around and cause some damage.
Or what we've also done is we tried to put a bike in the back of the truck.
A full size bicycle in the back of the truck takes up a lot of room.
It's awkward to get in with the cap on.
If you just have a tonneau cover,
you would have to lay the bike sideways and that would take up
most of the box of the truck.
But we have a cap.
It's it's a little awkward to get in and to get out of.
But with this thing, we fold it right up, we put it in.
It fits easily under a tonnea cover.
Fits easily in with our cap.
It hardly takes up any space at all.
It's really nice.
Plus, sometimes we get to a campground and we want to drive over to a place
where we can go cycling, like we might want to drive
into a nearby town and ride around the town.
Well, if that's the case, we have to figure out some way
to put our bikes in the truck to take them with us,
because we don't have a bike rack on the truck.
It's attached to the trailer.
So having a folding bike or two would be ideal to
just throw them in the back of the truck or even in the backseat.
Now I'm no bike expert.
I'm not going to go a deep dove into the specs.
But I will tell you a little bit about what this bike offers.
The Dahon K-One is an aluminum alloy bike.
It has seven speeds that you change with a grip shifter.
This is a folding e-bike with a hub drive, pedal assist, motor to give you a boost
for riding further and faster on flat, even terrain.
It's perfect for RVers and urban commuters who don't have space
to store standard e-bike.
When it's
all folded up it's 25 and a half inches long, by 15
inches wide by 32 and 5/16 inches tall.
It's recommended rider height is 4'9" to 6'3".
The weight capacity is 230 lbs.
The wheel size is 20 inch diameter by 2 inches wide.
It weighs 42 lbs.
It has a motor with an output of 250 watts.
The battery is a Samsung with a voltage of 36
volt and a capacity of 8.7 amp hours.
And it comes with a limited five year warranty.
The battery is stored in the seatpost right here.
So if you want to take the battery inside to keep it warm during the off season,
you can just bring the seatpost in the house with you.
Or you know what, it's a small bike when it's all folded up,
you can bring the whole thing in the house with you.
Some e-bikes have a throttle on it
where you just simply press that and the bike will take off.
You don't even have to pedal at all.
This isn't like that.
There's no throttle on this.
This is a pedal assist e-bike.
And with pedal assist, there's two kinds.
You have the cadence sensor kind and you have the torque sensor kind.
This is a torque sensor kind.
Cheryl's bike, her Powertrail Junction
e-bike is a cadence sensor kind.
With the cadence sensor at whatever power level of assist you have it at
as you're
pedaling, when you do the motion of the pedals
that just engages the motor and the motor comes in full on,
and when you stop pedaling, the motor stops.
Start pedaling, motor comes on full time.
With the torque sensor, like this one,
it senses when you're applying pressure to the pedals.
So as you apply pressure to the pedals, it applies some power.
The harder you push on the pedals, the more power it provides.
So as you get to a hill and start digging in
to go up that hill, the motor provides you more power.
So with the torque sensor, you get a much more natural ride.
You don't feel the motor starting and stopping.
It's just giving you an assistance.
The torque sensor is usually found on the higher end pedal assist e-bikes
where the cadence sensor is usually on on the lower end ones.
This is the power button.
Turn on the main power.
Hold it down for 3 seconds.
Power comes on.
At the very top it shows how much torque is being applied to the pedal.
Then it shows the battery strength.
This shows the level of assistance. It's at one right now.
You can go right up to five levels of assist
just with the up and down arrows.
This shows your speed.
I have it set to kilometers per hour, but you can also set it to miles per hour.
This is the odometer.
There's the trip meter.
There's the volts. There's the current.
And this is the time that the bike has been powered on.
So we're at one minute and one second right now.
You can just go through those.
If you hold down the plus button at the top,
it will turn
on the headlight and it also illuminates the screen.
Hold it down, turn off the headlight.
There are four adjustments to folding this bike up, handlebars,
seatpost, middle brace and the pedals.
Here's how it's done.
And that's it.
There's your bike.
Cheryl and I have both been riding this bike around this campground,
along the campground roads and along the old railway bike trail.
I've gotten a real appreciation for it.
I was really concerned with the small tires, the high stem
for the handlebars, the high seatpost that this bike might feel a little flimsy,
might have a little bit of flex in it, but no, nothing like that.
It felt very stable.
It's even okay if you have like small roots and small rocks and things like that.
This bike is not meant to be a mountain bike.
It would not do well as that at all.
But if you're taking around the campground or you're going on
regular cycling trails, there's no problem with it at all.
It holds up really well.
And where I really love this bike is when I did my first uphill.
Was that ever nice.
That e-bike motor kicked in and just gave me
the assistance to make it uphill a lot easier than normal.
So if you're limited on space, when you go camping,
a folding bike might be the one for you.
Might not be this exact one.
This is an e-bike.
This retails for around
$1899 U.S.,
which I think is about $2600 Canadian.
Dahon has many other models of bikes that are not e-bikes.
They generally range from about $650 to about $2,000 for for the non e-bikes.
But they, they're all folding bikes.
The size of this
when it's folded down
I could squeeze it into the front compartment
in my travel trailer, but I wouldn't do that.
It would be just too tight.
But if you have a fifth wheel, something like that, with bigger compartments,
this would fit in easily.
If you don't have a trailer and you just have a car, this fits in trunks.
It fits in hatch's for a hatchback back.
Back of sport utility vehicles.
It's it's a pretty small little package and it'll fit in many places.
So if you're limited on space or you have no way of putting a bike
rack on your vehicle, then a folding bike is an excellent solution.
So for now, I think what I'm going to be doing
is on the trips that I know that we're just going
be riding around the campgrounds and doing some easy bicycle trails.
I'll probably be bringing this bike because this is a really nice ride.
I can go a lot further on it
because I don't get as tired, but I still do get exercise with it.
So this is the bike for that.
If I'm going somewhere where I know there's going to be some mountain
biking trails or other rough trails that I want to go on,
I'll probably be bringing my old mountain bike for that.
And if one of our kids is coming with us, then this bike is definitely
coming with us.
Because for a third bike,
we'll just put this in the back of the truck and it'll be nice and easy.
I'm really going to like that.
So I hope we gave you something to think about, about folding bikes,
about e-bikes, folding e-bikes.
So you have to think to yourself, is this the kind of bike
that is going to make my camping adventure even better?
Well, that's it for this video, and I hope I gave you something to think about
and have fun on your next camping adventure.
We'll see you in the next video.