Best Locks for Electric Scooters

What Sold Secure grades actually mean

Sold Secure is a UK-based testing house, now part of the Master Locksmiths Association, that attacks locks the way a thief would — with hand tools, bottle jacks, cutters and, at the top grades, power tools — and awards a grade based on how long the lock resists. The grades that matter for anything you'd put on an electric scooter run Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond, from least to most resistant. Diamond is the hardest to earn: it is the grade Sold Secure reserves for the locks that hold out longest against the most determined attack. Among the 9 locks we track, 5 hold Sold Secure Diamond and 4 hold Gold.

Two things are worth being precise about. First, a grade is a graded lab result, not a guarantee. A Diamond lock resisted a defined test for a defined time; it did not promise that your scooter will still be there in the morning. A patient thief with an angle grinder and no witnesses beats almost any consumer lock eventually — the grade buys you time and deters the opportunist, which is most of what a lock is for. Second, the grade is tied to a specific product and often a specific variant. Sold Secure certifies “Granit X-Plus 540/160 HB230”, not “ABUS locks” in general. We match the exact certified model, and where a brand's Amazon listing is a different variant than the one on the register, we do not attach the grade to it.

Why we rank on the register, not the listing

The single most common way an accessory guide misleads you is by repeating a certification claim from the seller's own copy. An Amazon bullet that reads “Sold Secure Gold” costs the seller nothing to type, and we have seen listings claim a grade the register does not show. So we invert the usual order of work: we start at the Sold Secure Approved Product Search — the certifying body's own list of what it has graded — and work outward to products, rather than starting from a product and trusting what it claims. Every grade on this page was read from that register and checked, word for word, against a saved copy of it. If we could not find a lock on the register at the grade a seller claimed, the claim does not appear here.

Amazon still has a role — just a narrow one. We use it for three things only: the ASIN that lets us link you to the product, the current price and availability, and physical specs like weight, which we label as seller-supplied when that is where they came from. A weight printed on a listing is the seller's number, not an independent measurement, and we say so on the card. We never let Amazon be the source of a certification.

Grade first, then type and weight

Within a grade, two things separate locks: what kind of lock it is, and what it weighs. Lock type matters because different designs resist different attacks and suit different parking. A hardened chain is flexible and easy to route through a scooter's frame and a fixed rack, but it is heavy. A U-lock (also called a D-lock) is rigid, cheaper for the same security, and the shackle is hard to get a tool onto — but it only fits where its fixed opening reaches. A folding lock packs small and is convenient, and the best now reach Gold, though the many hinges are inherently more to defeat than a single shackle. We rank a chain above a U-lock above a folding lock at equal grade, all else equal, because that reflects how much working room each design denies an attacker.

Weight is the honest tradeoff nobody markets. The Diamond locks here weigh between roughly 1.5 and 2.1 kilograms; that security lives in hardened steel, and steel is heavy. On a scooter you are already carrying a battery, so a two-kilogram lock is a real daily tax. We show the weight on every card we have it for so you can decide how much security you are willing to carry. One caution on our own numbers: where a lock's type is a design that isn't a clean chain, U-lock or folding lock — Litelok's hardened bands, for instance — we leave the type blank rather than guess, and the score then rests on grade alone. That can let an ungraded-type Diamond lock edge a Diamond U-lock by a point or two purely because a field is empty, so read the grade tier first and treat one- or two-point gaps within a tier as noise, not a verdict.

How to actually lock a scooter

The best lock on a bad technique is a wasted purchase. Lock through the frame — the fixed part of the scooter — and to a solid, immovable object, ideally a proper cycle stand rather than a signpost a thief can lift the whole scooter over. Keep the lock off the ground, where a thief can use the pavement as an anvil, and fill the shackle so there is little room to insert a tool or jack. Folding scooters make this awkward because there is often no large fixed triangle to pass a shackle through; a chain or a longer U-lock helps. Two different lock types are harder to beat than two of the same, because they force a thief to carry and use two different tools. None of this is a legal statement: your state may require lights, a bell or a brake to ride, and that is a separate question we cover on each state's law page — a lock is never a legal requirement, only a sensible one.