That's already been answered. Stories abound about "Find My Doohickie said it was at this address. I even knocked on the door, and the person that answered said, 'yup, have your phone, whatta ya gonna do about it?'. Cops said file it with insurance." Cops don't care about a $1000 phone, they're not going to care about your bicycle, either (which has also been proven on multiple occasions).

Cops cared about my stolen bicycle. They took my report, were very happy I brought a copy of the original invoice and a few weeks later I had mail informing me they had retrieved my bicycle and that I could pick it up. This was in Germany, mind you.

I wish it worked like this in the UK. If memory serves in London a motorbike has a 1 in 12 chance of being stolen in any given year, and I suspect it's a lot higher for bicycles.

To be fair when my bicycle was stolen the police did care, but they were quite frank with me about the odds of recovery being virtually zero despite having CCTV of the incident and the getaway vehicle.

Haha, Europe vs. America changes everything.

The do care about stolen vehicles tho. Motorcycle theft is a big problem.

AirTags would probably be the cheapest option for relatively reliable motorcycle tracking. However, there are already devices that can be connected to the bikes battery, hence basically run for ages, that also connect to GPS and GSM.

Tracking with AirTags assumes the thief (or someone closeby) uses an iPhone AND has the 'Fine my' feature activated, which is, given how motorcycle thieves operate in some areas of the world, is relatively unlikely. So you're probably still better off using a GPS+GSM tracker

That depends on the state you are in. That is how it will play out in CA, not at all how it will play out in TX.

States can be pretty large and diverse - the town I live in in California would have a couple of officers at my door in short order if this situation were called in...