You’ve heard about the eye-candy, low volume retro jewels from the Detroit Bicycle Company. This isn’t them.
This is Detroit Bikes. They are creating a simple, low-cost, practical urban bikes that should retail for just under $500. And they expect to be building them in the city of Detroit – up to 100 a day if all goes as planned.
Detroit Bikes is starting to get noticed. The Detroit News and Crain’s Detroit Business both wrote about the new company and its founder, Zak Pashak, an entrepreneur from Calgary.
Pashak told the News, “Henry Ford’s goal was to create affordable, reliable transportation. That’s my goal.”
However, the best, more comprehensive coverage of the new company is on Detroit Make it Here.
Pashak is intent on taking advantage of the industrial opportunity here. He said that he doesn’t think he would have been able to easily find welders and machinists in Calgary and that in Detroit he can buy an industrial building for $300,000 that would cost more than $2 million in his native city.
Manufacturing bicycles “doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I could start in Calgary,” Pashak said.
It’s possible to produce affordable, American-made bikes in volume, especially in Detroit, he said.
This is really exciting. We’re not sure the last time bicycles were built in earnest within the city of Detroit.
We are sure about wanting to buy one of these.
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