DAHON had one of the most impressive booths at China Cycle 2025 where they showcased both their electric and analog folding bikes, along with their first non-folding bike.
While we’ve covered some of DAHON’s electric bikes in the past, most of our U.S. readers would be surprised to learn that DAHON is the world’s largest folding bike manufacturer, selling over five million bicycles since 1982. Founded by physicist professor Dr. Hon and his brother, DAHON pioneered the folding urban bicycle in the 1980s and has spent the last 40+ years continually refining and improving their designs.
At China Cycle 2025, we had the opportunity to visit the DAHON booth, talk with Dr. Hon over lunch, and see two of their innovations — DELTECH and Super Downtube — in person. After the show, we toured a new joint factory DAHON is building with Golden Wheel, one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in China.
In our conversations with Dr. Hon, we came away impressed — not just by the incredible rigidity and speed of their new folding e-bike, the K-feather, but also by the growth potential DAHON has with Golden Wheel as a manufacturing partner.
DAHON 2.0: Improving Speed and Performance of Folding E-bikes
The K-Feather is DAHON’S latest edition to their e-bike lineup. Here you can easily see the DELTECH cable system that adds rigidity to the beautiful folding bike.
DAHON used China Cycle 2025 to roll out their new “DAHON 2.0” campaign — a push to highlight their engineering advancements in folding bikes. At the center of that effort is what they’re calling the DAHON-V suite, a set of two significant designs aimed at making their bikes more rigid, more durable, and ultimately, faster.
The first innovation is the Super Downtube, which adds an additional triangular support where the center line of the frame meets the downtube. This extra bracing is designed to “increase longitudinal rigidity and strength” — something I appreciated as soon as I saw it. It actually reminded me of my daughter’s 2nd grade science project, where she tested various shapes to see which were most stable and rigid. What she found — and what most adults already know — is that the triangle is king.
The second innovation in the DAHON-V suite is DELTECH, a unique cable system that runs from just below the headset to the bottom bracket. When the bike is folded, the cable relaxes. But when unfolded and ready to ride, it tightens into a rigid support line. DAHON says this increases frame rigidity by 15%, which in turn reduces stress on the frame and boosts riding efficiency.
While the Super Downtube felt obvious (and genius) to me, I was genuinely surprised by how much rigidity a cable could add to a folding electric bike. That wasn’t intuitive at all, and I’ll admit I was skeptical at first.
Fortunately, DAHON set out to prove their claims. They had a booth where riders could test how fast they could go on their folding bike versus a competitor’s bike. I won’t name the competing brand, but it’s a very familiar, popular one. I didn’t get to test the bikes myself — the line was incredibly long thanks to DAHON offering a $5,000 prize for the fastest rider — but I did watch multiple cyclists take their turns.
This was as close as I could get to the competition, as the line for test riders wrapped all the way around the booth at times.
The DAHON bike won every single time. Even more telling, the competitor’s bike actually broke on day one from the stress riders were putting on it, while the DAHON held up like a champ.
Touring the DAHON–Golden Wheel Joint Venture Facility
After the excitement of China Cycle, we had the chance to take a closer look at DAHON’s future — quite literally — by touring a new facility they’re building in partnership with Golden Wheel, one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in China.
While the DAHON / Golden Wheel factory was not completed yet, you can see the size and scale of the 44,000 ft2 building.
While the factory was still being built out, we could already tell the scale of the operation was impressive. DAHON’s target is to produce 500,000 bicycles per year from this 44,000-square-foot facility. As with other new factories we toured in China, the DAHON/Golden Wheel plant is being designed to utilize more automation and robotics. It’s not just about producing more bikes — it’s about producing them faster, with more consistent quality.
This partnership is a big deal. Golden Wheel’s massive production capabilities paired with DAHON’s engineering expertise could open the door for much larger output and potentially more competitive pricing — both key factors in bringing more DAHON bikes to the U.S. market. While DAHON is already a major player overseas, this kind of manufacturing boost could help them become a far more familiar name to American riders.
After seeing the innovations at China Cycle and the scale of the Golden Wheel project, it’s clear DAHON isn’t just refining their folding bikes — they’re gearing up to scale them in a way we haven’t seen before.
Even though the factory wasn’t producing bikes yet, it was stacked to the ceiling with parts ready to be assembled as soon as the factory was completed.
Final Thoughts: Innovation Meets Opportunity
Between the DAHON 2.0 campaign and the new Golden Wheel joint venture, it’s hard not to be excited about where DAHON is headed. The Super Downtube and DELTECH technologies aren’t just clever engineering tweaks — they feel like meaningful steps forward in solving the challenge of making a lightweight folding e-bike that rides like a “real” bike.
The K-feather in particular has my attention. On paper, it has the potential to be one of the best lightweight, folding city e-bikes available, and based on what I saw at China Cycle, it’s going to be very interesting to test its rigidity, ride quality, and speed against other popular urban folding bikes like Brompton and GoCycle.
And then there’s the production side. DAHON has already sold more than five million bikes worldwide, but the scale and efficiency of the new Golden Wheel partnership could unlock a whole new level of growth. If they can pair their technical expertise with the ability to produce at a larger scale, we could start seeing even more DAHON bikes in Europe and Asia — and we hope to start seeing significantly more in the United States.
For me, it’s clear that DAHON is doubling down on performance, quality, and capacity — and they’re doing it in a way that could reshape what people expect from a folding bike.
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