Damn, that is super cool!
femurat wrote:I wonder why these things aren't the standard equipment every bike comes with.
Taking a stab here, I suspect it’s a few core factors — here are a few that came to mind:
1. Bicycle companies likely lack the expertise of a company dealing in lock systems for many years, meaning they’d have to buddy-up with a lock company in order to integrate a locking system that doesn’t make their product a laughing stock on launch.
2. [related to #1] Integrating a lock means all bikes of type/model X will feature the same lock design, making the attack surface against that bike type very uniform: learn to bypass or pick the lock of bike type X and suddenly every bike of that type becomes an easy target. If integrated into a more expensive/nice bicycle I suspect that information on attacking the lock would spread relatively quickly.
3. Consumer choice on locking systems, and it’d be costly to offer a variety of scaled locking systems.
4. [continuing on that theme] Costs generally.
5. It doesn’t prevent the bike from being carried away physically — someone with a bit of know-how could remove it after physically stealing it.
That said, I reckon there could be a market for this — it’s actually a rather neat intersection of security and usability, providing a bit of a security for great usability (for one, not having to carry a chain and lock with you, as you noted). It doesn’t protect against the general threat of someone rocking up with a truck and throwing the bike on the back to make off with it, but it certainly would stop an attacker from simply riding off with your bike if you were to duck into a store for a few minutes.
Really cool find. Thank-you for sharing. I find that security–usability intersection really interesting, and this is a particularly curious example.
(And a bit of a pity the lock seemingly looks to be just a shitty wafer lock?)
Tue Apr 05, 2016 6:25 am 
