“Oh yeah, I still ride them,” Sykes adds. But don’t for one moment think they’ll spend eternity gathering dust. It’s unlikely that many of today’s kids will actually get to experience the thrill of riding one of the brand new Choppers most of the limited edition new models have already been sold to collectors. I paid a hell of a lot of money for that: £5,500.” “Bearing in mind that Alan Oakley came back on November 3, 1968, I’ve got a hub-dated MkI Chopper which is from December 11, 1968. “I’ve got one which nobody has beaten yet,” he adds. Of alloy wheels, so a few came out with steel wheels on them. “768 special edition jubilees were made,” he explains. The holy grail of Chopper collecting, according to Sykes, is a certain version of the special edition Chopper released for Christmas 1976 to commemorate the Queen’s silver jubilee the following year. “Some of them come with pictures of the kid next to the Christmas tree, and some have the original receipt with them showing how much they paid down at Halfords.” Also, since they were handmade in Raleigh’s Nottingham factory, the odd ‘Friday afternoon job’ with upside-down stickers sometimes crops up too. The cult of Chopper even has its own creation myth: the late Raleigh designer Alan Oakley, flying back from a research trip to the US to see the Chopper’s pre-cursor, the Schwinn Stingray, famously sketched designs for the first prototype on the back of an airmail envelope. Raleigh made three ‘marks’ but hundreds of different options three, five and 10-speeds dropped handlebars and a few rarities where the factory had to shift old stock and blended old parts with new. Part of the appeal of collecting Choppers comes down to their sheer variety. I did a deal with a guy in America, for nine MkIIs and four MkIs for the bike.” “The most I paid for one was for a 10-speed, brand spanking new. We’ll have to wait and see whether the release of the new Raleigh Chopper will stimulate further success across the different sides of the business.“The most expensive I’ve seen went for over £7,000 and that was a boxed MkI 10-speed still wrapped up in its box,” Sykes adds. Kidger says the electric bike market isn’t growing at the rate Raleigh would like it to, but it’s still double the size it was in 2019, and Raleigh has seen “some real successes over the last five or six years in that market”.Īs an indicator of this success, the Financial Times reports Kidger estimates Raleigh’s share of the UK’s electric bike market to be around 5 per cent and that Raleigh made a pre-tax profit of £2.82m on sales of £74.5m in 2020. Recently, it released the Raleigh Modum, a folding e-cargo bike. It has been adapting to the cargo and electric bike market for a number of years, with ebikes becoming a core part of its business in 2018. ![]() The brand was bought in 2012 by the Accell Group, one of the biggest electric bike manufacturers and brand owners in Europe. Kidger says ebikes provide an opportunity for Raleigh to expand: “We’ve identified that as a real growth area for the business, and we’ve pivoted Raleigh into that emerging market,” says Kidger. Kidger hopes the Chopper will appeal to people’s hearts and minds. ![]() “Electric bikes are the single biggest benefit to a lot of the challenges the UK faces at the moment, in terms of congestion charges, and net zero and sustainability targets that have come in,” he says. In turn, Raleigh’s electric bikes provide practical solutions to facilitate this move to more frequent cycling, and Kidger suggests they could help people take kids to school, replace a second car and help with wider issues. Kidger says this is where releasing heritage models joins up with the more modern side of Raleigh’s business: electric bikes.īy pulling on the hearts and minds of people in evoking the heritage of the brand through bikes such as the Chopper, Kidger hopes Raleigh will convince people to cycle more. Kidger says the Raleigh Chopper created a “movement” in the 1970s, with the bike encapsulating a sense of joy, freedom and fun.ĭesigning a new Chopper, which so closely resembles Choppers of old, is a way for Raleigh to help people rediscover what Kidger calls the “contagious joy of cycling”. Lee Kidger says Raleigh wants people to rediscover the “contagious joy of cycling”.
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