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.
In the case of bikes, it’s luckily mostly true that you get what you pay for and that bikes in bike stores tend to be reasonable quality. They aren’t all great but at the minimum they’ll generally accept readily available replacement parts and not fall apart right away. The nicer bikes will last many decades.
The thing about bikes is that running a bike store is a very low margin business that barely pays the bills. Most bike shops are purely in the business for the passion of it. They love bikes, they love sharing the hobby, and they hate seeing people turned off of cycling because their department store bike stripped out the crankset two weeks after purchase. They also don’t make much money on bike sales; they mostly rely on servicing and parts/accessories to keep the lights on. This means customer relationships tend to be important to them.
If you have a good bike shop like this near you, you can have a frank conversation with the people at the shop about your needs and they will steer you towards something decent.
The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.
I don’t disagree with you. Low quality bike manufacturers have gotten very good at making their bikes appear high quality to uninitiated while being cheaply constructed.
Unfortunately I think this holds true for a lot of things these days. Back to the analogy of boots, high quality footwear is undergoing a renaissance right now where resoleable long lasting shoes are more available and more affordable than they have been in decades. However, that comes with the undercurrent that some brands have sold out on construction quality to make a quick buck because they know how to keep the “indicators of quality” on the outside while using cheap materials on the interior construction of the boot.
Luckily there is a great, passionate, community for bikes that will happily help people find quality products. I just don’t want to discount the work of the engineers, the bike shop owners and the manufacturers of quality bikes. There are an insane number of really incredible modern bikes that blow anything from the 60s or 70s out of the water in nearly every way.
