A team of Chilean engineering students have designed a bike that comes complete with detachable parts that can be re-positioned to lock the vehicle in place. They are calling it the Yerka Project and have marketed it as the world’s first unstealable bike.
The genius of it is the frame itself literally acts as the locking mechanism. This means that if a thief wanted to break the lock, they would have to break the actual bike, leaving little to be desired. This also eliminates the need to go out and purchase a standalone bicycle lock, which can be opened up relatively easily anyway.
The Yerka works by splitting the bike’s down tube in half and extending it outwards around a nearby object like a tree, a light post, or a designated bicycle rack. The saddle and seatpost is then removed and inserted into a hole that was drilled into the down tube. After that, a lock at the end is secured and the rider can walk away knowing that their bike is safe.
However, clever hackers will probably still find a way to unlock this bike. No matter how unstealable it might be, someone will figure it out. In the meantime though, it gives a nice sense of security for those hoping to deter your average bike thief from attempting to jack the bicycle.
For a good look at the design, watch the videos posted below:
[Thanks for the tip Mike!]
[via – Cnet]
Those sure are expensive-looking rims to be leaving unsecured like that…
I was just going to type something along this lines. “Can’t steal the whole bike? let’s do it with the wheels, etc.”.
Anyway i think it’s better than nothing, a creative aproach nonetheless.
I like how quotes around “unstealable” are used. Not sure designing the entire bike to be “theft resistant” is the best approach from a design perspective, especially if it isn’t actually that secure (I cannot speak to how secure this is or is not at this point in time).
The most “theft resistant” bicycles are the $20 junkers you get at yard sales. Scratch up the paint, cut some gashes in the seat, peel back the handlebar tape and leave it dangling, put rusty cables on it, and nobody will want to steal it. I did a 40 mile ride once with a guy, his bike looked like he pulled it out of a dumpster but he led the peloton for most of the ride.
Print up “EBOLA” name stickers for added effect.
I used to think that until my junker was stolen. It was even locked up!
$99 new, 6+ years old, over 5,000 km and looked like it.
People really will steal anything.
Living in a student town, I can assert that even the most rusty piece of crap gets stolen if it isn’t secured with a motorcycle-style chain lock. Which is no good to keep your saddle in place.
Hate to tell you this but people will steal any bike no matter how shitty they look and/or are. And if they can’t steal it they’ll vandalize it just for fun.
In fact it’s better to get the bike stolen – at least then it will probably get dumped somewhere and one can perhaps get it back in one piece.
“unstealable”. Yup…. and the Titanic was “unsinkable” :P
Yup… those wheels will be gone 30 seconds after the bike is locked if it was in NYC.
I spy with my little eye a pin tumbler lock that can be raked in less than ten seconds.
It isn’t even a good one! Looks like a ZE keyway or similar direct from China. The common keyway and curvature of the facing and gaudy chrome job gives away it’s low-cost origin.
That is just the sort of lock someone opens with a bit of wire wiggling around that leads to those overinflated egos on youtube. Wait, I kinda went the irony approach with this. No intent behind it, just pointing out a singular design flaw.
lol at “clever hacker”. I think a Chilean thief will easily solve the issue in a week or 2. hahahahahaha (I am Chilean by the way, you guys have to come down here to see those bastards in action to know what I’m talking about XD).
Oh come on, NYC is the bike theft capital of the world. Do they name bike locks after Chile? Some bike locks come with anti-theft warranties that are valid everywhere on the planet except for NYC. I know people in NYC who pay more for the bike lock than for the bike.
i thought that Amstedam was the capital of the bike thief, there they even steal the stolen bikes, hahaha
Philly, PA and Camden, NJ are other cities that lock manufacturers do not honor warranties in
Unstealable my ass.
That’s a mechanical lock on the end of that thing. Therefore, it can be picked. Possibly with the end of a BIC pen, if it’s one of those cheap rotary locks with the pins that point down the length of the lock barrel. They don’t even talk about what kind of mechanism the lock is, which is amazing considering their absolute claim.
Also, that pivoting bar in the centre looks seriously dangerous. If that thing isn’t locked together somehow to prevent it from coming apart along the axis of the bar, that bike is going to fall apart mighty fast considering the forces you’re going to experience when going over bumpy terrain (like, over a curb or speed bump).
Honestly, I’d rather buy a real bike with a frame that is actually welded together and a $80 lock then this thing. It looks extremely unsafe to ride and their primary marketing claim is essentially impossible to enforce.
can you imagine a big muscular guy riding this bike up a hill in san francisco or seattle? It would disintegrate beneath him. Or imagine it coming apart on a fast descent.
Why would it? I suggest you keep your bullshit to yourself and leave engineering to people that actually know what they are doing.
It probably wouldn’t come apart but for a comfortable ride you want a frame to be as stiff as possible. This type of frame wil always be so flexible it is uncomfortable to ride (at speeds higher than a slow walk at least)
This is a clever way of storing a bike lock, but nothing even close to “unstealable”. To describe it that way is just begging for someone to say, “challenge accepted” and make the bike disappear.
Cut the seatpost and replace its tube. Perfect for resale. If some slight damage is acceptable just break the seatpost out instead. That hole in the top half of the down tube looks to be a major a weak point. People use car jacks to break locks.
Exactly. Hacksaw and a roll of duct tape and no problem riding off. Cut the seatpost, fold up, and duct tape the two poles together if the slider wont go up. Might as well write “Steal this bike” on the side.
Those are some nice wheels and tires there, will they still be there when you get back? And those pedals, very nice and they come off very quickly with the right wrench.
Here is a thought. That seat post is about 2 feet long or so. Why not cut the seat post right above the locky thing on the bottom. You are left with a 1foot 10inch seat post, which is still about 1foot longer than it needs to be to act as a seat post.
Exactly. I don’t see why you couldn’t just do this and ride off with the bike.
That may not be as trivial as it seems due to the bottom part of the post sticking out of frame tube preventing it from being assembled correctly (if designed properly). Also the upper part may not fit its place if it is to be cut not with a saw (or kind of) but with some large cutter that would crashes the post.
Unstealable? Why just drop a clothesline from a roof, tie it to the frame, then lift the bike off the lamp post. Where’s your unstealable bicycle now?
What’s common on college campuses is that one thief will stand on another’s shoulders and lift the locked bike up and over the post. Sometimes they are brave enough to do it in broad daylight with witnesses everywhere.
I thought about the human pyramid scheme too.
Most lamp posts are some distance from the build so you would need a crane of some sort. Then that thing is why a lamppost is call a lamp post, the lamp, often place on an arm would foil your plan most likely. Lamps that aren’t power by underground wiring are power by an uninsulated wire, connecting the lamps in series.
Most of the times the lamps are connected parallel to each other. Otherwise one broken lamp would disable every other.
A lamp post like that is definitely powered by an underground line. At least in a first world country. In fact on Manhattan there are no overhead wires at all.
Or they just chop the post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTMohKzjT6k
The real test: Leave it locked up near a high school in Atlanta Georgia and see if it is there the next day
Atlanta is the place where half an inch of snow shuts down the whole city, they do not seem like clever folks.
The best test on the planet is to lock it up in NYC close to a cluster of restaurants. Stealing a bike is the most straightforward way to bootstrap yourself into the food delivery business.
They manage to get a day off over a measly half inch of snow. Seems pretty clever to me.
But yeah, I think the NYC restuarant test could be a good idea. I mean, the challenge to steal a bike is pretty easy. The challenge to make the bike unstealable is the hard part. Maybe some hackers need to get together and start planting bikes around the city, and video tape the results of thieves attempts on them. Real life feedback.
In NYC if you want to keep your bike, you bring it into your apartment and lock it to the radiator (yes you have to keep it locked up inside your apartment!). This doesn’t look like it will lock to a radiator.
Nothing is unstealable.
You can’t steal my virginity from the women that took mine.
I can get you the box it came in :)
‘Women’!? Plural!?
Anatomical puzzle to be sure. Conjoined twins maybe?
Nah, I can figure that one out, to a point. Lucky guy (y)
I see this ending up with neither owner nor the thief having a functional bike, because there’s nothing keeping a thief from vandalizing what they can’t steal. A pocket size tubing cutter can be devised. Using that wouldn’t be any more brazen than other theft or vandalism procedures.
Ahahahah! You’ve just gotta wonder how cold those paintballs were.
Some of the splats didn’t look very wide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi6XtthI2F0
How is this in anyway more theft resistant than any other bike with a lock. It’s not like they’re removing anything and taking it with them, it’s still a full bike with probably a shitty lock to boot.
I think they consider it “unstealable” because provided the lock cant be picked, you’d have to destroy the bike to actually steal it.
Of course that’s assuming the lock really is secure and can’t by bypassed some way. And ignoring the fact that some people would steal it anyway and just try to repair it later or sell the other parts.
well the wheels, seat, handle bars, pedals, cassettes, fork all have value to a thief and if they are scrapers as well and destroy the main part of the frame it has value in weight.
Master recalled those Bicable locks. IIRC they offered a direct swap for one not pickable with a Big pen.
I think you meant Kryptonite, Bic-able, and Bic pen yes?
Pack the frame with nine volt batteries, add a small tesla coil to the metal frame, as long as you don’t leave it for days on end nobody will want to take it. Perhaps you could even charge it by wirelessly drawing power from the lamp post I can think of a few around here that tick and hum. An experiment for another day when I’m not so tired perhaps.
Some how I doubt it would be legal here. (like the car protected with flame throwers)
High voltage can be easy to generate.
Ditch the Tesla coil and replace it with a humble relay. Wire it up so the 9V goes via the NC contacts, thru the coil and back. Coil charges, relay clicks, breaks circuit, repeats.
While it’s sitting there buzzing, grab hold of the coil pins.
Now you know what the diode is for!
Anyone that reads Hackaday knows nothing is “unstealable”. Half the people here have the skills to pick the lock. A month after these bikes are released there will likely be 3d printable skeleton keys just because they issued a challenge.
It looks like M.C. Escher’s bike!
funny most bikes are salvaged for parts here. and those are still freely available on this.
Brakes, bolts, …
Funny unstealable, more annoying when you return and a few parts are missing and you have to replace them.
Little problem, most part in my county is forbidden to stall your bike on streetlight or any other pole, we have special bicycle stallings that you are obliged to use.
Even though the design might not be so great at doing what it was designed to do. I really like the way they have tied the system into the existing parts of a bike.
Assuming you can’t just pick the lock. Cut the pivoting tube, which can’t be structural if it moves, bring your own saddle. Ride off…
I suspect the real hack here is a bunch of advertisers using the “unsinkable Titanic!” fallacy to get more coverage and discussion for an unexceptional product than it reasonably deserves.
I don’t have anything to add to a bike security discussion beyond having a plan for where you’re going to lock your bike out of sight of all passersby is inconvenient, but helpful. When a thief can’t spot the opportunity, they can’t act upon it.
And “we” bought it hook , line and “sinker”.
Taxi!
That which is locked Vs that which never is:
http://www.nva.org.uk/past-projects/witte+feitsenplan+white+bike+plan-24/
That pole isn’t safe, it’s just bolted to the ground.
Where I live this bike is easy to take, for the ones taking bikes, because they use a truck, with a crane, taking all the bikes they find, and melts them down for the metal value, and nothing else. (And sometimes they even take the pole)
So, the lock here is just useless. (Like any other lock)
http version of video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5efaWSWwlk
not just the kryptonite locks but maybe other locks has that fatal flaw in the locks
im asuming the pivoting downtube/ lock is held on with bolts……bring an allen wrench set with you and that lock is kaput…….
Better idea: Hide a taser circuit in the frame and make it touch activated. Have a hidden camera near by and watch the fun. Optional. install a cell module to alert the police with video clip that the guy laying next to your bike foaming at the mouth tried to steal it.
I guess i’m a lil’ grumpy this morning :-)
Nostalgia alert:
When I was a kid we didn’t have a car but had a tandem with a sidecar. M&D took me to Blackpool for the day and locked it safely to some steel railings. When we came back it was leaning against the wall and someone had nicked the railings.
Wow, I’d rather just use a bike lock, or anyting other, than this.
It looks like this new type of lock build-in, would just make it even easier to still — the thief wouldn’t even need to use a bolt cutter or be really strong at that.
The lock is always the week point… the whole fancy mechanic part will be unlocked as the lady did, after you hacked that lock… so unless the lock is supercool this won’t help anything….