Swappable battery technology might be the answer to range anxiety and re-charge time issues, but it is also providing an opportunity for the less honest members of our society

Electric Motorcycle Battery Theft on the Increase

It doesn't matter what we invent, at some point someone else will find a way of profiting illegally from it. And by that we mean, of course, theft.

Theft of cars and motorcycles, either whole or in part, is nothing new. It doesn't matter if you've saved your whole life to afford something: if someone else wants it, then there's not much you can do to prevent them taking it.

If the rise of electricity as a motive power for cars and motorcycles is inevitable, then so are the ever-inventive opportunists who want something without paying for it. You might have thought that the rise of the electric motorcycle might have got rid of so many parts that would be attractive to a thief - engine, exhausts, electronics and so on - but, unfortunately, an electric motorcycle also has something that will become more and more valuable as time goes on: batteries!

With the rise of swappable battery technology, it was obvious that here was a commodity that would be valuable, especially given the ease of removal. But it seems that even vehicles with fixed batteries are gaining popularity among the criminal hordes.

In Milan, Italy, 12 people were recently arrested for stealing the batteries of electric scooters. Shared vehicles, such as e-bicycles and scooters, are the most affected. The cells are dismantled and sold on the black market or in the reconditioned second-hand market, most of the time to oblivious buyers looking for replacement batteries for their own vehicles, maybe because their own were stolen...!

Taking a battery pack from electric vehicles is not as easy as it sounds, especially if they are hard-wired into the vehicle. The majority of current battery packs include extensive coding and software interfaces that are only available from the manufacturer.

This means that we're not talking scruffy street urchins who are doing the stealing, but highly organised and well-equipped gangs who know how to bypass these systems and make the batteries suitable for resale.

The problem is growing: in 2020 and 2021, an estimated 700 battery packs were stolen in Milan. City Scoot, one of Milan's scooter-sharing firms, reported 600 missing batteries, worth around 600,000 Euros.

What this means, apart from an increasingly lucrative black market in batteries, is more money needing to be spent on systems that will protect them and make them unusable outside of the current installation. That will drive up the cost and so on.

Electrification of personal transport is an incredibly exciting development and if the development curve continues its steep climb, who knows where we might be in five or ten years. Sadly, what is also not known, but can be guessed at, is where the criminal element of society will find huge profits as electrification takes hold.