The Hummingbird Electric has had a rebrand. The innovative electric folder – which weighs just 10.3kg in its lightest flax fibre frame incarnation – will henceforth be known as... drumroll please... the Prodrive Electric Folding Bike.
The Hummingbird folding bike was originally designed by London-based Petre Craciun. After a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015, Oxfordshire-based motorsport firm Prodrive came on board as manufacturing partner.
The original version of the bike doesn’t feature a motor, but the Hummingbird Electric followed and when we reviewed it in 2019, we found it to be of the very highest quality – if perhaps a little overpriced.
What is now the Prodrive Electric Folding Bike is built around the ‘all-in-one’ Zehus rear motor hub which contains all the electric elements needed to power a bike, with power levels and other settings controlled remotely from a smartphone app.
While the folded-down package isn’t as compact as, say, a Brompton, its lower weight and the way it’s firmly held together means it’s among the easiest e-bikes to lift, manoeuvre and carry around.
At the time of writing, the Hummingbird-as-was features twice in our guide to the lightest e-bikes – once in its 10.9kg carbon fibre form and again with the flax fibre frame. (The idea behind using flax is that it’s sustainable as well as lightweight. The waste from the production stage is biodegradable, meaning it’s less harmful to the environment to dispose of than other materials' waste products.)
Prodrive is apparently looking to do produce more vehicles that would fall under the micro-mobility banner and has therefore brought the Hummingbird under the Prodrive name as part of the newly-labelled Prodrive Lifestyle Collection.
The move has also given rise to a new website: prodrivefoldingbike.com
The Prodrive Electric Folding Bike is available for £4,495, while the flax version comes in at £4,995.