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I wonder if there is more that bicycle manufacturers/dealers can do to prevent theft or help recover stolen bikes - not because they're obligated but just to im
by mc808 10y ago
I wonder if there is more that bicycle manufacturers/dealers can do to prevent theft or help recover stolen bikes - not because they're obligated but just to improve sales. Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree.
- tlrobinson 10y agoExploding bike seats? http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYlBT1d_GWo http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYlBT1d_GWo Seriously though, GPS receivers and GSM radios are a few dollars each these days. Seems like an easy thing to hide in the frame (of course a thief could still part out everything except the frame)
- dpark 10y agoThe problem is then you need to remember to keep your bike's GPS tracker charged. Your bike isn't carrying a large capacity 12V battery the way your car is.
- marcoperaza 10y agoI wonder if you could do the same thing a car does, charge the battery with the engine.
- dpark 10y agoFor electric-assist bikes, the GPS tracking could be worthwhile. For other bikes, the complexity of the system seems not worth it. It's probably more cost effective to just insure the bike and not have a small generator, battery, GPS, and wires all over. For ultralight racing bikes, definitely not, but those are probably a minority even in cycling-friendly cities like Seattle.
- ptaipale 10y agoPut the GPS tracker + battery in the headlight of a bike with hub dynamo... the tracker would work, you can activate it for just a few munutes a few times a day. But if the police does not care, it is not useful.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoI would only buy one that charged while I rode my bike.
- tlrobinson 10y agoFor this purpose you could just have the cellular module wake up every x minutes to check to see if it should begin tracking. Or use BLE and an accelerometer. If your phone isn't in range and the bike is moving then starting tracking. I haven't done the math but you could probably get away with recharging every 6 months or so.
- anc84 10y agoThat sounds like a great Kickstarter project. ;)
- dpark 10y agoI have to be honest. I'm seriously doubting that math you didn't do. In my experience GPS murders small batteries. And putting large batteries on bikes seems like a nonstarter for bikes that aren't electric assist.
- mikepurvis 10y agoBut the GPS only needs to be active when the bike is a) moving, with b) the BLE phone connection absent. There are ultra low power motion sensor ICs that literally have a GPIO for "motion detected". Put that on the reset pin of your CC2541, and you'll be set for months of battery life.
- dpark 10y agoI am still doubtful but frankly neither informed nor interested enough to debate it further. Maybe BLE is more impressive than I've been assuming.
- tlrobinson 10y agoThere are a number of BLE beacons that last for a year on a single CR2302 battery. They only transmit for a fraction of a second at a time, then sleep for 2+ seconds.
- Someone 10y ago
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- justinator 10y agoHere you go, http://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=128 http://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=128
- rorykoehler 10y agoYou could hook it up with a dyno that attaches to the bottom bracket with the gps sitting in the down tube. Cycling would charge it. Also checkout lock8.me . They made a smart lock instead which makes a lot of sense.
- jdblair 10y agoI've thought a lot about this. The problem with hiding the tracker in the frame is the GPS and GSM antenna will be blocked by the metal tube. There would have to be a way to get the antenna out (maybe a special bottle cage, with the antenna leads going through the lugs?). It would work for carbon fiber, though, and those are the most expensive bikes.
- Audiophilip 10y ago>The problem with hiding the tracker in the frame is the GPS and GSM antenna will be blocked by the metal tube. Not true, there are multiple battle-tested solutions out there, like these: www.spybike.com
- victorhooi 10y agoI have one of their products. It's not a bad product - but the company seems to have gone bust. They've stopped answering any emails, and the last news was that their Seat Post Tracker was meant to launch in 2012/2013: http://www.bike-eu.com/sales-trends/nieuws/2012/8/spybike-seatpost-tracker-10110639 http://www.bike-eu.com/sales-trends/nieuws/2012/8/spybike-se... Their current trackers are 3G only - and most countries are shutting down (or have already shut down) their 3G GSM networks. I'm definitely on the lookout for any replacements.
- ptaipale 10y agoTheir current trackers are 3G only - and most countries are shutting down (or have already shut down) their 3G GSM networks. What? Some operators are closing 3G networks, but not, I think, "most countries". Frequency allocation is moved to LTE, yes. But 3G modems fall back to 2G (GSM) which is'nt going away any time soon in most places (yes, there are exceptions), and 2G is quite enough to send location info.
- victorhooi 10y agoSorry, I meant 2G - e.g. in Australia, Telstra/Optus have already announced shut-down dates, the third network Vodafone hasn't, but they're expected to soon - which renders the device useless.
- ptaipale 10y agoFinding your bike is not helpful if the police is not interested. And they usually aren't where I live. Except if you're yourself willing to enforce your retrieval with violence... at which point the police will be interested if everything does not go easily.
- LanceH 10y agoI've heard of people meeting, trying "the fit" and just riding off.
- marincounty 10y agoI bet you live in the Bay Area? Specifically, the east bay? Near Berkeley? There's a two well known flea markets where bike thieves sell their stolen property. Even if you are at the flea market, with you bike's serial number in hand, the cops do not come out. A huge guy, who had his bike stolen once too many times advertises in CL. He will literally show up at the flea market, and take your bike back, after you show him the serial number. (Guys like this do not get enough props. He does it because it's just the right thing to do.) I have never used his services, but have had bikes stolen. I've literally given up. My bikes are now pretty much throwaway. If they are stolen, it's no big deal. I want to buy a motorcyle this summer, but theft is first feature on my mind. Would I prosecute a bike thief? If I felt they were professionals--yes. If, I thought it was a yuppie, who gets a rush out of stealing--yes. If it was a homeless person--no. I saw a great deterrent to bike theft at Target. Outside the store they had these little pods you put your bike in. You supply the lock. They take up too much room for most businesses though, but they look like you could stack them two units high?
- cpeterso 10y agoKarin Cycle in Berkeley is a known fence for stolen bikes. The Yelp reviews are depressing, but clearly busting Karim Cycle is not economical for the Berkeley Police Department. http://yelp.com/biz/karim-cycle-berkeley-3 http://yelp.com/biz/karim-cycle-berkeley-3
- walrus01 10y ago"A huge guy"...? New service like uber: "rent a 350 pound Samoan" VC money please!
- WalterBright 10y agoWouldn't a metal frame act as a Faraday cage and block all radio waves?
- lostlogin 10y agoA cage needs to be earthed - the rubber tyres probably hinder this, however I'm not an electrical expert at any stretch.
- WalterBright 10y ago> A cage needs to be earthed No, it just has to be around the object. Try wrapping your cellphone in aluminum foil. It won't receive or send anymore.
- 05 10y agoThere are commercially available trackers, e.g. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Bicycle-gps-tracker-GPS-GSM-GPRS-Quad-Band-Real-time-Google-Map-tracker-gps-305-Mini/1774760833.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Bicycle-gps-tracker-GPS-GSM-G...
- mc808 10y agoYes, I would look for something like that if I had an expensive city-bike. But the availability of trackers doesn't seem to have much effect on thefts or the perception that bikes are an easy target.
- s_q_b 10y agoOne problem is that, even if you have your device GPS tracked, it can be hard to get the police to intervene, especially in large cities. Someone once stole my iPhone 5. I had find my iPhone enabled, and the phone was locked down. The thief began texting me from his own phone, demanding ransoms ranging from $100-$1000 for the return of the phone, while aggressively threatening to throw my phone into the Potomac. So I called the police. I reported the theft, and the address of the thief's residence, and the fact that the phone was tracked by GPS. They transferred me to a Detective, who told me that they would file a stolen property report. Throughout the week, I continued to receive increasingly erratic messages from the thief. The one consistent message was that if I didn't pay, he was insistent on throwing my phone into the river. So I arranged to meet him at my bank at the Dupont Circle branch (a busy location with guards.) I would make out a check to cash for $200, he would give me my iPhone, and I would stick around until the check was cashed. So when he arrived (we arranged to meet via picture exchange, so I had that as well as evidence), the thief approached me at the bank door. There was a police car immediately outside the bank, and I shouted to the officer "HELP!" The man ran. I went to the officer and said, "That man stole my phone!" Instantly, he jumped in his vehicle, told me to hop in the passenger seat, and we took off down P street. The officer stopped the car, sprinted after the thief, and he obeyed the cop's order to stop. The man was taken to jail for theft and resisting arrest. I said I didn't want to press charges as he was obviously severely disturbed. I asked if he could be given rehabilitation or treatment. They said they would place him on a 72-hour psychiatric hold. As far as I know, that maybe only got him a shower, a few meals, and three days in a psych ward at GW Hospital, but I thought it better than anything else I could do. I still wonder if I could have done something else to help the guy. But the real moral of my story, is that even with a GPS beacon, it can be very very difficult to get the police to recover stolen property.
- nmrm2 10y ago> Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree. If you're spending that much on a bike then you're cycling regularly (communter and/or every weekend type). You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often. Bikes aren't like cars -- a Corolla will get you from point A to point B just as well as a Cadillac, but a doubling in the price point of a bike (esp. 500 to 1000 range!) has a massive impact. Of course there are people who buy racing bikes and ride them a few times a year. But those people rare enough that it doesn't make sense to spend the money designing and stocking a product just for them. And anyways, the guy on the sales floor is probably going to be the most important factor in their purchasing decision.
- galdosdi 10y ago> You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often. Yes and no. If you ride that much, you won't be riding a shitty bike. However, it is NOT the case that if you ride that much, riding a "non-shitty" bike means you ride an expensive bike. Bike manufacturers would love for you to think that you need to pay a lot to get a decent bike, but it isn't true. You can easily spend $50 to $300, trick out the components for another $50 to $200, and have a _fantastic_ ride that can beat the pants off of most bikes out in the wild, including bikes that cost thousands. And, the more you ride and the longer you've been riding, the more likely doing this comes easily.
- nmrm2 10y agoSure. But the people with the skill-set and interest in doing that are going to do so anyways; I don't see how anti-theft tech would convince that type of person to shell out an extra few hundred for a bike. They would just buy something and install it themselves. I just don't see the market for integrated anti-theft. Seems more like a custom component type of thing.
- galdosdi 10y agoI'd go further than that -- riding a cheap bike with a heavy U lock makes theft so rare in most places that it's not worth wasting any further time/money on the problem.
- chrischen 10y agoThey could implement a system like iPhones (all iPhones register with Apple servers and lock up if reported stolen). Mandatory serial numbers, and make it illegal to purchase or own a bike without a serial number, or to buy a stolen serial number.
- Symbiote 10y agoBikes already have serial numbers. It's called a frame number, and is stamped into the metal, usually on the bottom bracket (where the pedals connect). At least in the UK, there's a police register of stolen bikes using these numbers. It's also illegal to buy stolen property. https://www.immobilise.com/ https://www.immobilise.com/
- qq66 10y agoIllegal to own a bike without a serial number? That sounds like overkill.
- fian 10y agoExpensive carbon bike frames can't be stamped with serial number. I have had a few carbon frames, I think only one had a visible serial number on the outside...on a sticker. None of the bike shops could provide a serial number at time of purchase.
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- victorhooi 10y agoI use a Spybike (http://www.spybike.com/ http://www.spybike.com/) Unfortunately, the company seems to have gone bust. They have stopped responding to emails - and their tracker is 3G only - many countries have started to shut down their 3G GSM trackers. There was one on Kickstarter before called the "Bike Spike" - however, it turned out to be a fraud, and the creators ran away with backer's money (I didn't back them). The Spybike isn't bad - the big issue is getting a GPS lock in urban areas, long GPS lock times from a cold-start, and battery life. Definitely keen to see what else people are suggesting these days.
- victorhooi 10y agoCorrection - I meant to say 2G only (as in, their trackers only work on the 2G GSM network, which is being shutdown in many/most places).
- justinator 10y ago> Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree. Renter's insurance usually covers stolen bicycles.
- walrus01 10y agoReally expensive bikes you just don't ever lock anywhere in public. I don't know anyone in Vancouver who would lock a $3500 road or mountain bike anywhere. You're either in possession of it or it's in your garage. There are B&E teams who break into garages in metro van looking for peoples' MTB collection, so this doesn't really solve the problem, but then you've got alarm systems, bars on windows, house insurance etc.