Best Electric Scooter Locks & Trackers: 5 Options for Every Budget

Three Rules for Electric Scooter Security

1. No Scooter Lock Is Theft-Proof

With enough time and the right tools, any scooter parked outside can eventually be stolen.

The goal is to make your scooter difficult enough to steal that a thief decides there must be an easier way to get a scooter than stealing yours.

A basic lock can stop someone from simply grabbing your scooter and riding away, and even stop a thief who has basic hand tools. At the other end of the spectrum, a serious angle-grinder-resistant lock can make even the most prepared thief spend several very noisy minutes trying to cut through it, and cost them $10 or more in destroyed blades just to try.

Neither is invincible, but either approach can drastically reduce your risk.

2. Bring Your Scooter Inside Whenever You Can

Even if you have the best lock available, locking up your scooter will never be as secure as just taking it with you.

If a store will let you roll the scooter inside, bring it with you. One of the advantages scooters have over bicycles is that they're relatively compact, even when fully unfolded. You'll feel a lot less awkward rolling around inside the grocery store with a basket on the handle of your e-scooter than pushing an e-bike through the aisles.

If you're riding with somebody else, another foolproof approach is to take turns watching the scooters when you stop somewhere.

No lock or tracker works as well as simply keeping the scooter with you. This is one of the big advantages of high-performance single-motor scooters relative to dual-motor scooters. Single-motor scooters are much more portable. You might even be able to fit one in or under the basket on your shopping cart.

3. Ideally, Use Both a Lock and a Tracker

Locks and trackers solve two different problems.

A lock tries to prevent your scooter from being stolen. A tracker gives you a second chance if the lock fails.

For a scooter you regularly park outside, I like having both.

Let's start with the locks.

1. A Basic U-Lock or Folding Lock: The Everyday Choice

For most scooter riders, this is where I'd start.

I'm using the VMAX folding lock as my example because it's the one I normally carry, but this section also applies to any decent mid-grade U-lock.

The biggest advantage of a folding lock or small U-lock is convenience.

The VMAX lock weighs about 1 pound 11 ounces including its mounting hardware, and it mounts directly to the scooter. Typical U-locks are a little stronger, but the trade-off is they're heavier and can be more awkward to carry.

The VMAX folding lock comes with a mount, which I didn't initially plan to use, but once I tried it I was hooked. You only need to arrive at the store once without your lock to realize how handy a mounted lock can be. You can get mounts for most U-locks as well, so definitely look for one that comes with a mount when you're shopping.

No matter how strong your lock is, it can't protect your scooter if you forget to bring it with you. A lock mount solves that!

Where Should You Lock an Electric Scooter?

On most scooters, I like to put the lock around the neck of the scooter, below the folding mechanism.

You want to lock through a structural part of the scooter that can't easily be unbolted, removed or cut.

Just as importantly, make sure whatever you're locking to is actually secure.

If you lock your scooter to a short parking meter, for example, somebody may simply be able to lift the scooter and lock over the top.

Look for something solid, permanent, and tall enough that the scooter can't be lifted free.

Some scooters make this trickier than others. The Ninebot MAX G3 and G3 Plus, for example, put the external battery in an area where I would normally want to place a U-lock. If you don't use the optional battery, locking it up is normal, but with the external battery locking the Ninebot with a U-lock can be tricky.

Regardless of the scooter, spend a few seconds thinking about both sides of the lock: what part of the scooter you're securing and what you're securing it to.

What Will a Normal Lock Stop?

A decent U-lock or folding lock should stop casual theft and resist most basic hand tools.

What it probably won't stop is a determined thief carrying a cordless angle grinder.

That doesn't make an everyday lock useless.

A VMAX customer recently shared a photo of our folding lock after someone apparently tried to cut through it and steal their scooter.

The lock looked terrible.

The scooter was still there.

That's exactly what a lock is supposed to do.

For short stops and moderately priced scooters, this level of security may be all you need.

For more expensive scooters or longer periods outside, there's another level.

2. Hiplok DX1000: Serious Angle-Grinder Resistance

The Hiplok DX1000 costs around $379 and weighs more than four pounds.

That's more expensive than some of the generic electric scooters on Amazon!

But the peace of mind is worth it because it's made to resist the most aggressive tool thieves carry these days: battery-powered angle grinders.

Locks like the DX1000 use materials specifically designed to make life miserable for an angle grinder. Angle-grinder-resistant locks have three party tricks:

1. They're engineered to wear down cutting wheels
2. They're extra thick, which means cutting wheels have a hard time cutting the full thickness
3. They have square shackles, forcing the thief to cut all the way through the lock twice, to remove it!

If you have time, check out some of the YouTube videos where content creators time themselves to see how long it takes to defeat the best locks and how many blades get destroyed in the process.

Again, there's still no such thing as an unbreakable lock. But forcing a thief to stand in public for several minutes throwing sparks and changing grinder blades is a pretty serious deterrent.

Three heavy-duty options worth considering are:

• Hiplok DX1000: approximately $379
• Hiplok D1000: approximately $329 (much smaller)
• OnGuard RockSolid: approximately $247

There is one catch.

Check the Fit Before You Buy

These locks can have surprisingly small openings.

Fortunately, you can test whether one will fit your scooter before spending hundreds of dollars.

Just take a sheet of paper and cut out an opening matching the inside dimensions of the lock.

For example:

• Hiplok DX1000: 112 x 205 mm
• Hiplok D1000: 92 x 155 mm
• OnGuard RockSolid: 83 x 174 mm

Take your paper template outside and try positioning it around the scooter and the kinds of bike racks or posts you normally use.

It's a five-minute test that could save you from owning a $379 lock that doesn't fit.

So, that's how to lock it down. Let's check out ways to chase it down, if the lock fails to do its job!

3. Apple AirTag: The Easiest Scooter Tracker for iPhone Users

For about $25, an Apple AirTag is one of the easiest ways to add a second layer of security to a scooter.

It's tiny, the battery is inexpensive and replaceable, and Apple's Find My network is enormous.

But there is one important thing to understand:

An AirTag is not a GPS tracker.

It doesn't have its own cellular connection.

Instead, it communicates with nearby Apple devices, which can anonymously relay the AirTag's location through the Find My network.

In a busy city full of iPhones, this can work extremely well. In a remote area where few people pass nearby, updates can be much less reliable.

Once you get close to an AirTag, compatible iPhones also offer Precision Finding, which can guide you toward it with distance and direction information. I found out that the range for a direct connection can be very short!

That's incredibly useful for something that costs around $25.

But there's a huge catch with AirTags.

AirTags Can Warn the Thief!

Apple includes anti-stalking technology designed to warn someone if an unfamiliar AirTag appears to be traveling with them.

That's an important safety feature. Imagine if someone slipped an AirTag into your backpack or stuck one to your car without your knowledge.

The downside of Apple keeping us all safe from stalking is that, if someone steals your scooter and they have an iPhone, the AirTag is eventually going to reveal itself and let the thief "beep" the AirTag to find where it's hidden!

Does this ruin AirTags as a tracking device for scooters? There was only one way to find out!

So, I hid an AirTag on one of my scooters, and hired my buddy Mike to come steal my scooter out of the garage!

Can I find Mike before Mike finds the AirTag?

At first, Find My did nothing. It didn't alert me that my scooter was gone, or update the location. Ten minutes after the "theft" the scooter still showed as being home with me.

Then I got an update at a nearby mall at the Target store.

But, when I arrived at Target, the scooter seemed to be at Starbucks. At this point, I had searched inside the store, outside the store and thought the AirTag just wasn't working correctly, but soon learned what was really going on.

Once I got closer (a lot closer), Precision Finding took over and pointed me directly toward the scooter and even revealed how many feet away it was. This was definitely the coolest (and most exciting) part of the process. Suddenly, there was Mike, and my scooter!

The AirTag worked.

Experiments like these are so useful. In this case revealing two surprises:

1. If the scooter is still moving, you'll end up chasing ghosts. Mike didn't stay put when he reached the mall. As a consequence of the delayed position-reporting, I was chasing where Mike was 5 minutes ago, not where Mike is now.
2. Mike never received an alert about being stalked. In the 1.5 hours between the "theft" and the recovery, Mike's phone never alerted him that he was being tracked.

So, if you chase your scooter down immediately you won't find it until it stops moving, but you will have a chance to find it before the thief is alerted to the tracker!

All in all, still an amazingly useful piece of tech for $25. After the experiment was over, I put an AirTag in each of my son's (age 9 and 12) backpacks.

But, of course, for a scooter you're still going to need a lock!

4. Life360 Tile: A More Discreet Alternative

The second most popular tracker is by Life360 aka "Tile". Their trackers start at roughly $20 and work on a broadly similar concept.

Like an AirTag, Tile can use nearby phones to help report the tracker's location rather than requiring its own cellular connection.

The downside is that Apple's Find My network is much larger.

That means AirTags, as laggy as they are, will still be faster and more reliable at generating location updates.

For example, I have Tile trackers on a couple guitars located at my Dad's house in a medium-sized town 50 miles from where I live. The last two pings on those guitars are 7 days and 11 days old!

But Tile has an interesting advantage over AirTags when it comes to theft recovery: Anti-Theft Mode.

Anti-Theft Mode is designed to prevent the tracker from snitching on itself.

That's a key feature when a thief has your scooter.

Because making a tracker intentionally difficult to detect raises obvious stalking concerns, Life360 requires identity verification to use the feature and says it can impose substantial financial penalties for misuse. You're basically signing up to be sued if you use Tile to stalk someone, and rightfully so!

The tradeoff is fairly simple.

AirTag: larger tracking network and excellent close-range Precision Finding.

Tile: smaller network, but the tracker can remain harder for a thief to detect.

But if you want something truly next level, check out this next one!

5. Monimoto 9: The Tracker That Calls You

The Monimoto 9 is my favorite tracker here, provided you can make it fit your ride. It's more than twice the size of the others!

It also costs a lot more at around $180, plus about $49 per year for cellular service (after the free two-month trial)

The reason it's completely different from an AirTag or Tile is that it has cellular and GPS capability built in.

This is what enables the Monimoto 9's most compelling feature: it will call you if someone is messing with your scooter! So, you could potentially prevent a theft in progress, not just track your scooter once it's gone.

Here's how it works. The Monimoto comes with a small wireless key fob.

When the fob is near the scooter, the tracker knows you're there, alerts are disabled and battery usage is near zero.

Walk away with the fob and the system arms itself automatically.

If someone starts moving the scooter while the key fob isn't nearby, the Monimoto contacts your phone.

That's great peace of mind if you're sitting inside a coffee shop. You don't need to keep glancing out the window. And, if someone does start messing with your scooter outside, you'll have a chance to yell at them and scare them off, especially if you pair the Monimoto 9 with one of the locks we mentioned earlier in this post.

That's a huge difference from checking Find My 20 minutes later and discovering your scooter is gone.

As with everything in life, there are downsides.

The Monimoto costs considerably more than an AirTag or Tile, requires a yearly subscription, needs to be recharged roughly once a month, and at approximately 1.5 inches wide and nearly four inches long, it's much harder to hide on an electric scooter. Note: the marketing material says the battery may not need to be charged for up to a year when the tracker isn't active (i.e. the fob is with the tracker constantly).

If I were trying to protect an expensive scooter, or had to park all day, every day at work, this is the tracker I'd want. That is, if I could find a good place to put it. Which brings us to…

Where Should You Hide a Tracker?

I'm deliberately not going to show you exactly where I've hidden trackers on scooters.

Every scooter is different, and I don't particularly want to publish a guide showing scooter thieves where they should look.

That said, there is one important and huge limitation when it comes to hiding trackers on electric scooters.

Electric scooter decks are made largely of metal!

Putting a wireless tracker deep inside a metal enclosure can weaken or even block its signal completely!

So try to find hiding spots behind plastic trim, swingarm covers, front fork covers, possibly even just stuck securely to the belly of the scooter provided you can make it look like it belongs there. Be very careful if you try to stick one between a fender and a tire. Tires need a certain amount of clearance when spinning fast!

Whatever tracker you use, be sure to test it after installation to make sure it's working.

Trackers are often configured to work differently at home than in other places, so it can be helpful to test-track your scooter at places away from home.

Which Scooter Lock and Tracker Should You Buy?

My recommendation is pretty simple:

Use one lock and one tracker, with the amount you spend scaled roughly to ¼ of the value of the scooter.

For a $500 scooter, I'd probably use a decent everyday U-lock or folding lock plus an AirTag or Tile.

For a $1,500 or $2,000 scooter that gets parked outside regularly, I'd seriously consider an angle-grinder-resistant lock and a dedicated tracker like the Monimoto 9.

If you can only buy one thing, start with the lock.

Stopping someone from taking the scooter is much better than trying to locate it afterward.

And if you can bring the scooter inside, that still beats everything.

One Final Warning About Recovering a Stolen Scooter

I was completely safe chasing down Mike and my scooter, because Mike didn't really steal my scooter.

The difference between a staged AirTag theft recovery and a real one is: I knew exactly who I was tracking and knew there was no danger when I found him.

A real theft is different.

If your scooter is stolen, don't confront the thief yourself.

Contact the police and provide the tracker location along with your scooter's serial number and proof of ownership.

Also remember that a dot on a map doesn't necessarily mean the police can simply walk into a building and retrieve your scooter.

If a tracker leads to a house or apartment building, figuring out exactly where the scooter is, and recovering it legally, can become much more complicated.

That's yet another reason early notification, and finding the scooter while it's still outside, is so valuable.

Use both!

There's no perfect scooter lock, and there's no perfect tracker. But trackers are so inexpensive (and fun) that cheap trackers are a no-brainer as a second layer of security.

For most riders, the sweet spot is simple:

Buy a good lock, light enough to carry with you, plus a hidden tracker as backup. For higher-value scooters or longer alone-time, bump up your security budget. Then, be sure to test your tracker before you need it. And finally, bring your scooter inside whenever you can.

You'll never make a theft-proof scooter but the idea is twofold:

1. Make your scooter so hard to steal that it's not worth the effort, or exceeds the capabilities of the thief's tools

And more importantly

2. Give yourself peace of mind when you're out riding. Knowing you have things "locked down" means you can fully enjoy the ride and feel more comfortable parking without worry.

Scooters are so much more useful when you can park just about wherever you want!