E-bikes are becoming increasingly popular with bike thieves. It was only on Monday night that thieves broke into an Austrian bike shop in St. Johann in Tiorl and thought they were safe with 56 stolen bikes - most of them high-quality e-bikes - when the handcuffs clicked 240 kilometres away. According to the Tiroler Tageszeitung newspaper, the burglars were caught in Lower Austria near Amstetten. In a concentrated operation, police officers were able to locate and stop the van with the thieves and their loot on the motorway and return the bikes to the owner of the bike shop.
The rapid success of the manhunt is due to the fact that the e-bikes were equipped with the GPS tracker. The system is about the size of a lighter and is hidden in the bike. Nothing can be seen from the outside. However, if the bike is moved without authorisation, the tracker triggers an alarm on the owner's mobile phone. This means that the victim is not only informed of the theft, but can also see where their bike is. As the BikeTrax GPS tracker used is dependent on a power supply, the tracker currently only works with e-bikes.
"On average, we have one to two offences per week that can be solved with the help of our anti-theft system," says Stefan Sinnegger from PowUnity. He continues: "This theft is so far the biggest that we have been able to uncover using our system and even trumps the success in Berlin, where a theft of 20 e-bikes was prevented. Without BikeTrax, the shop and the insurance company would have suffered a loss of over 100,000 euros."
GPS trackers are now available from many providers such as Trackito, PowUnity, Velocate, Incutex and Paj. A mini SIM card is usually inserted into the devices, which then sends its location data to the user via an app. The trackers can be hidden in the head tube or in other places on the bike, some are built into rear lights or are installed directly in the e-bike drive. The sticking point with most GPS trackers for theft protection is the power supply. With e-bikes, the power supply via the e-bike battery is simple, but with normal mountain bikes it is more difficult.
