Motorcycle

A motorcycle carries more locks than most riders think about until one of them stops working. There is the ignition, usually a small wafer cylinder that lives outdoors in salt and rain. There is the fork or steering lock, often on the same key. There is the seat — which is what stands between you and the battery, the toolkit and the fuse box — and on a touring bike a topcase and panniers as well. When the key goes, all of them go at once, and the bike is immobile in a way a car with a spare fob is not. Two things make bike work its own trade rather than a smaller version of car work. The locks are exposed, so a cylinder that is merely worn on a car is often seized on a bike, and the honest answer is more frequently repair or replace than clean and carry on. And since the late nineties most machines carry an immobiliser: a chip in the key head that the bike interrogates before it will start. That is why a freshly cut key can turn the ignition perfectly and do nothing at all — the blade is right and the electronics are not, and they are two different jobs with two different fixes. The work happens at the bike. The cutting and programming equipment travels to wherever it is sitting — a driveway, an underground garage, the side of the road — which is the difference between fixing the problem where it happened and paying to trailer a machine that will not start. All-keys-lost included: a working key can be originated from the bike’s own locks or key code with nothing left to copy. And proof of ownership is checked before any key is cut or any lock is opened, on a motorcycle more firmly than anywhere else. A bike is the easiest vehicle on the road to take away, and the check that occasionally annoys a legitimate owner is the same check that protects them.