Personally I can say the only reason I don’t ride my e-bike more for daily use is due to the rampancy of bike theives and vandals. Shit is genuinely getting hard to deal with and I don’t have time or money to put up with it.

I remember a YouTube video someone did in New York City where they simulated stealing a bike using various increasingly-slow and obvious methods. Started with a pair of bolt cutters and went through a few others, including an angle grinder.

It culminated with them using a hammer and chisel to slowly carve their way through a bike lock chain. Someone stopped to help, suggested that they hold the chain differently. A NYPD cruiser stopped, asked them to move out of the street because it was on the edge of the sidewalk and they were lying in an active lane of the street, and then moved on.

I think that as long as something is light enough to be placed into a van and is stored in the open, if crime is an issue in the area, it’s probably going to either need to be really cheap – so not worth stealing – or have sophisticated measures to deter it, like requiring registration or maybe smartphone-style components that require cryptographic authentication and can’t be “reset” without the owner being involved.