Hi all,
I have an old Ducati 996 on foreign plates and can’t get theft insurance on it.
I have a garage at home in Chiswick, in a quiet neighborhood, and would ride and leave it in a public parking garage in central London once a week.
How crazy is bike theft at the moment? Should I be okay like this for a few months ?
I have been fine with an R1 and am old 900SS in NYC, but am not sure if London is a different animal.
Thanks !
Impossible to predict. Too Many variables.
Will it be chained in both places? Is the public carpark high footfall, for everyone? What’s the security there?
And so many more…
The short answer is, if it looks tasty, and the wrong person sees it, it will be gone.
There are some here that will tell you that any bike left unchained will go walkabouts within 10mins and others that they’ve never had an issue despite leaving something exotic without even a disc lock for days on end
Also not sure how it works with foreign plates but would the bike be ULEZ compliant? If not that could be another £12.50 a day
Get a ratty scooter for the commute. Much cheaper and safer.
EPCPLC saw my CoC, told TfL about my NOx, now I am ULEZ, CC, and LEZ free
Anecdotal only: I parked my 748 chained to a lamppost in front of my house in Perivale (west London) for a year and it was never touched.
I am guessing the 748, most certainly the 900SS, and probably your 996, are not on the list of desirable bikes which will be quickly sold into a professional chain of criminals who either break them for parts to be eBayed, or shipped abroad overnight.
I could have just been lucky and maybe none of the organised gangs happened across my bike in the time it was on the street.
Ultimately locks, chains, alarms, CCTVs, mean nothing if they want your bike. The best defence you have is them not knowing about it. Garaged in Chiswick is good (don’t flash it around outside the garage when cleaning it), leaving it in a public parking lot is less good. You can mitigate that by putting a dust cover on it.
Can’t really say either way. We’ve had members whose bikes looked like they were fresh from a salvage auction, held together with cable ties plus hopes and dreams get lifted from West London.
If an insurance company refuses to insure against the risk of theft they will have good reason and that good reason will be their own data.
Entirely anecdotal but I have worked on 4 building sites in west/central London in the last few years and I have known at least one person have motorbike stolen at each of them. 3 of them were MT07s but I don’t know if that is a reflection of anything other than them being a relatively common newish bike.
I’ve never had any issues myself but then I was riding a 12 year old Yamaha XJ6 with 80,000 miles on the clock and a chunk of fairing missing.
