Everyone loves the classic ‘Dutch’ bike – curvaceous, loaded with down-to-earth accessories and dead practical. Once upon a time, you could buy bicycles like this in Britain from the likes of Raleigh or Dawes, but the British cycle industry went all leisure- orientated, before disappearing up its own bottom bracket, so to speak, which means we have to import this sort of thing these days. If you want a ‘proper’ bike, you really have to go to Holland, Scandinavia or Germany, but there are a few mass-produced machines too.

…very little lateral rigidity. In fact,it’s almost in Bickerton country…

We’re reviewing a fairly typical machine – Giant’s oddly-named SuXes – a pun that presumably works in several languages. Launched in early 2002, it’s selling in reasonable numbers here, and much bigger numbers in mainland Europe, as one might expect. Price is a tolerable £300-£360, and the SuXes does everything you would expect a Dutch bike to do, and does it reasonably well, so what’s the problem? We’re going to commit a major sacrilege here and give it the thumbs down.You may not agree with all of our reasoning, but we think you’ll agree with most of it.

SuXes-full?

The SuXes is a heavy beast at 19.4kg (43lb), and that’s with an aluminium frame.The price you pay for quality, eh? Well, not in our book, as we shall see. For the moment, we’d just like to remind you of a similar Giant bike that weighs 22.2kg.Yes, the Lafree Lite is 2.8kg heavier, but it’s a ready-to-run electric bicycle, and in our book, one of the nicest electric bikes you’ll find.Whip out the battery, and the Lafree is over a kilogram lighter than the SuXes. Begin to see the problem? If you live in Amsterdam, you’ll no doubt be happy with a 19.4kg unassisted bike, but in Sheffield, Bristol, or bits of Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh or Exeter, you’d do better to choose the 22.2kg bike that sails up hills on its own, surely?

OK, it’s a proper traditional bike without power-assist, but all that weight has gone into making a sturdy, rugged frame that’s easy to propel and will last for ever? Not in this case.The SuXes has a step-thru ‘ladies’ frame, with twin ‘top tubes’ that sweep down towards the bottom bracket, then change their minds and head south to join the seat tube. It all looks very rugged, but there’s little lateral rigidity, in fact, it’s almost in Bickerton country. For those unfamiliar with the more flexible kind of folding bike, this means you can twist the handlebars by a couple of centimetres relative to the saddle. With a substantial load on the rear rack, it’s easy to provoke a ‘shimmy’, whereby the load swings left when the handlebars swing right, and visa versa… An entertaining party trick, but not very helpful when you’re trying to put some force through the pedals.We’d also be worried about frame life. Aluminium is a great material, but it has a relatively low fatigue strength, and constant twisting and flexing can be very fatiguing…

The SuXes comes with the Nexus 3-speed hub for £299, or the 7-speed for £359. Ours is a 7-speed – something we’re particularly grateful for, because with the weight and flexy frame, you need plenty of ratios. At 37″ to 90″ the ratios are on the high side, an impression not helped by the slightly soggy feel of the 7-speed Nexus. Get on a long downgrade with a following wind, and the SuXes will pelt along, but in mixed uppy-downy terrain, it’s a bit depressing. Again, no problem if you commute a mile or two through central Amsterdam, but this is not a bike for more serious mileage or serious hills.

For the first few miles as the cables settled in, the Nexus tended to miss the odd gear, but once adjusted, it ran like clockwork, and we see no reason why it should not function without a hiccup for years and years. Our only real grumble with the Nexus 7- speed is that wheel removal can be a bit tricky.

Brake Miscellany

…powerful brake applications are an acquired art…a brake limiter makes sense.

Like the pricier Lafree, the SuXes comes with Nexus roller brakes. Non-technical readers must forgive a technical digression at this point, because this device is aimed at you and it’s worth having a grounding in its function.We’ve mentioned roller brakes before, and gradually become less sceptical about Shimano’s rediscovery of this ancient technology.The brakes work by squeezing steel rollers against the inside of a rotating steel hub.The bad news is that heat is rather concentrated, so these devices tend to include a ‘disc’ to disperse it.The rollers can make some strange metal on metal noises too, but being grease-packed, are impervious to the effects of water and/or oil, so the braking effect is consistent in all weathers.

Rollers have a tendency to fierceness in operation, so Shimano fits a clutch, preventing the wheel from locking up when the rollers do.We’ve had experience of the IM50 version of this brake, which apparently has a clutch, but you’d never know.The SuXes is fitted with the IM40, and on this hub (recognisable by its smaller ‘disc’) the clutch operates at quite low force. Under severe braking, the rollers lock, the clutch slips, and you won’t find any more braking force however hard you pull on the lever.

Shimano markets the system as ‘anti-lock’, but don’t get carried away with the idea that it’s as sophisticated as a car or motorcycle set-up. From our tests on the SuXes, we’ve found that the clutches will slip with a brake force of .45G with a typical rider, which is too high to prevent the rear wheel locking (it locks up at .33G on a dry road), and too low to get the best out of the front brake in the dry (a good stop should hit .75G or more). In the wet, or when cornering and braking (never a good idea), the clutch would almost certainly fail to work before one, or both, wheels lock, sending you flying.

That said, we’re very much in favour. Really powerful brake applications on a two- wheeler are an acquired art anyway, so a brake-limiter makes sense for most riders, most of the time. It won’t prevent slips and slides, particularly in wet or icy conditions, but it should more or less eliminate that most dangerous crash – the locked front wheel, sending you sailing over the bars.Two slight worries – the clutch will overheat rapidly if abused, so don’t overdo it on Alpine descents, and the rollers tend to lock and unlock with a jolt, which should be harmless, but might just provoke a slide in marginal conditions. Otherwise, a great step forward in road safety, as a former Metropolitan Police commissioner used to say about a certain car tyre.

Hub-mounted brakes offer many advantages, including the elimination of rim wear (caused by brake pads working against the wheel rim), so lightweight alloy rims can be specified. But for some reason the SuXes has chunky stainless steel examples – quite attractive in a retro sort of way, but all adding to the weight. As elsewhere, the messages are a little confused: high-tech hub brakes and low-tech rims.Why?

Accessories

All the usual ‘accessories’ are standard, as one might expect on this sort of bicycle. But (mixed messages again), the quality of the components is not really up to the job. There’s no suspension, but standing on a pair of tall and relatively wide Michelin Transworld City tyres, the SuXes doesn’t really need it.These tyres look exceedingly retro (let us guess: they’re the latest thing?) and claim to offer a degree of puncture resistance. Considering the upright stance of the bike, rolling resistance must be quite good, because we recorded 15.2mph on our test hill, which is about as fast as upright big-wheel bikes get.

The skirt-guard does its stuff (oh, all right,, no one actually tested it wearing a skirt) and the Axa lock works a treat.The rack is built in suitably chunky Dutch style and would carry a friend with ease, but we were concerned about the rather small 5mm bolts, which are also too short to go right through the chunky aluminium drop-outs.With the added uncertainty of the flexy frame, we’d be wary about carrying more than 10kg on the rack.

The dynamo is our old friend the Joss Spaninga Wave (see Giant Lafree, A to B 27). It’s not humongously useless, but would come some way down most people’s Christmas list. Incidentally, we retested the rolling resistance with the dynamo lights on (why didn’t we think of this before?) and recorded a speed of only 13.8mph. If that means nothing, putting the dynamo on is rather like swapping a free-running full-size machine for a bicycle with mediocre 16-inch tyres – enough to annoy you if you ride a lot at night. At the rear, very sensibly, the SuXes has a battery LED, but it’s poorly made (we snapped the lens clips changing the battery) and has no clever features.

The chainguard is of the all-encompassing variety, assembled from a sort of jigsaw puzzle of plastic components. It’s the sort of thing an infinite number of monkeys would have no trouble with, but you could get very confused on a long weekend. It’s probably a bit frail too – part of the jigsaw puzzle was missing on ours, thanks to heavy-handed couriers. Mudguards are substantial (heavy in other words) but a bit marginal in length, so you’d probably want to fit front and rear mud flaps for all-weather use.

Conclusion

Would the SuXes make a wise purchase? We think not. If you lust after this sort of thing, there are literally thousands of old Raleighs and Rudges knocking around for virtually nothing, because those pre-1960s bicycles really were made to last several decades.You can buy a very useable roadster for £20 or less (we’ve been trying to off- load one for years), leaving a couple of hundred quid for new cables, an 8-speed Sturmey hub, modern tyres and decent lights. No plasticky bits, no wobbly frame, similar weight, and a nice wodge of change in your pocket.

At the other end of the scale, you could spend £880 and buy a Lafree – a bike that weighs much the same, but powers up hills.Yes, it costs more than twice as much, but if you commute anywhere remotely hilly, that could be the best £500 you’ve ever spent.

Would we suggest buying a modern ‘classic’ of any kind? We might, if it skillfully combined modern technology with old-style practicality, but the SuXes does not.

Specification

Giant SuXes 7-spd £360 (3-spd £299)
Weight 19.4kg (43lb)
Gears Shimano Nexus 7-spd
Ratios 37″ 43″ 49″ 58″ 67″ 78″ 90″
Saddle Height 87-104cm
Reach 45-49cm
Tyres Michelin Transworld City 37-622mm

UK Distributor Giant UK Ltd tel 0115 977 5900 mail info@giant-uk.demon.co.uk web www.giant-bicycles.com