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.
That's a really neat folding bike, only thing it's missing IMO is a rear rack for the extra utility
Internal gears are amazing personally, I have them on my bike. They also allow the chain to last wayyyy longer as it's travelling in a straight line all the time, instead of being flexed back and forth on a normal derailleur. After owning the bike for a few years the factory-supplied chain is still perfectly ok when measured with a wear indicator.
Maintenance rant
Only tricky thing is the maintenance every 1000km for my Shimano internal gears, which requires taking the wheel off and removing the hub with special tools 😭. Perfectly doable but definitely set a few hours aside for it... I don't believe other internal gears from the likes of Rohloff and Sturmey Archer require this kind of maintenance but I could be wrong
That said, the "grandma bikes" in the Netherlands are all internal gears, and they're abused a lot - yet still operate just fine
The only concern I have is that these basically don't exist in the US, I think the closest option is something with a Pinion gearbox (like an internal hub, but relocated to the middle of the bike instead)
Are you talking about internal hubs? There are many bikes with internal hubs available in the US, far more than bikes with Pinions. Even department/sports stores like REI sell bikes with internal hubs. I have 4 bikes with internal hubs, one is a CVT which is a hoot to shift but heavy as heck.