Lots of people ride bikes for lots of different reasons. For some it’s transportation while for some it’s just for fun. Whatever your reason, your bike matters to you. Pick the best bike lock and you’ll significantly reduce your chances of having to walk back to where you locked up your bike and find only a broken lock on the ground. Which bike lock is the best though?
Every single buyer’s guide I work on I try to answer the question of what is best. When I wrote the best bike locks though, it was different. The best bike locks was the first of a new generation of buyers guides. Our team looked at ways to better help buyers and I got the assignment to see how it works in practice. I spent weeks trying locks and I interviewed everyone I could find who might have input on the best way to secure bikes or how they ended up getting stolen. I even cut one of the locks in half while testing and at the end I put together a buyers guide like nothing I’d ever done before.
It’s been over a year since I wrote the first version of that buyer’s guide. It’s seen revisions and updates since, and the locks in it have gotten serious use. After all this time, the 2023 Cyclingnews Awards is an opportunity to share which locks I still trust with my bikes.
Best overall
The most common attacks for bike thieves involve using relatively low technology tools. Grabbing a bar found on the street and prying locks open or bolt cutters are tools that have always been common. Over the last few years though, there’s something new. Portable angle grinders are now cheap enough that they are becoming a more and more common attack method. Unfortunately, that means most older locks are now little help.
In order to combat an attack from a portable angle grinder, you need a lock designed for that exact use case. The Litelok X1 is one of only a few and I tested it. Not only did I spend time using it in the typical way one uses a lock but I also cut it open with an angle grinder to see how hard it was.
Litelok doesn’t claim it’s impossible to cut with an angle grinder, and it’s not. If you want impossible to cut, you need to spend about double. What I found though was that it probably doesn’t matter. Because of the…
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