The balaclava problem: why electric dirt bikes get the blame, and who actually rides them

Let us get the uncomfortable bit out of the way. Some of the lads in balaclavas snatching phones in London are on Sur-Rons, and we sell Sur-Rons. The Met recorded 71,391 phone thefts in 2025, its officers say the offenders often use high-powered and illegally modified electric bikes, and by the end of July the force had seized more than 2,500 illegal e-bikes and e-scooters in 2026 alone. Those riders are thieves. They deserve the hate, the seizure and the crusher, and since 29 June the police no longer have to warn them first. None of that is in dispute here. What is in dispute is the idea that this is what electric dirt bikes are, or who rides them.

The same bike wears both uniforms

In August the Metropolitan Police expanded its fleet of Sur-Ron Ultra Bees from five to 25, paid for with money seized from criminals, and credited the bikes with helping cut phone theft across London by more than 13,000 offences in a year. Merseyside Police runs Stark Vargs for the same job and has officers on e-bikes chasing Sur-Ron riders through cemeteries. The Met's reasoning is the point: a lightweight, quiet, quick electric bike can go down an alley, across a park and up a flight of steps, and nothing with an engine can follow it. That is what makes it the thief's bike. It is also what makes it the police bike, the farmer's bike, the forestry bike and the bike a 14-year-old can race on a Sunday without the neighbours ringing the council. The tool is neutral. The rider is not.

We have been here before

Easter 1964, Clacton. A wet bank holiday, two groups of bored teenagers, some broken deckchairs and a few scuffles. By the Whitsun weekend the papers had turned it into a war, the Birmingham Post called mods and rockers "internal enemies" who would bring about the disintegration of the nation's character, and magistrates handed out jail sentences to make an example. Stanley Cohen spent his PhD watching it happen and in 1972 gave us the phrase for it: moral panic. Every decade since has needed its folk devil on two wheels. Rockers, mods, the scooter boys, the joyriders, the 2017 moped gangs, and now a kid in a balaclava on an e-moto. The clothes change. The editorial does not.

Here is what nobody will tell you, because nobody knows: how many electric dirt bikes there are in Britain, how many are ridden legally, or even how many the police take away. When a Member of Parliament asked, the Home Office replied that it does not hold data on the number or value of off-road bikes seized or destroyed. The only count that exists is the one in the headlines, and headlines count the worst thing that happened that week. We are not going to invent a statistic to answer them with. We are going to tell you who walks into our shop.

Who actually rides them

Parents, first. One of the busiest bikes in the building is the £1,399 RFN Warrior Youth, with a speed limiter the parent sets and a lanyard that kills the motor if the rider comes off. Then trail riders in their forties and fifties who have done the clutch, the carb and the kick-start and would rather not. Farmers and landowners who want something that starts in January and does not need a fuel can in the barn. Club motocross riders, because a Y-Volt Surge V or a Talaria Komodo is a full-size machine that does not wake the village. And, as of this year, the police. Not one of those people is wearing a balaclava, and not one of them is on the road, because every one of those bikes is sold as off-road only and it says so on the box, the invoice and every page of this site.

What they are actually like to own

Clean enough that you can ride one in a barn with the door shut. Cheap enough to run that the service schedule is a chain, two brake pads and a set of tyres; there is no oil, no clutch, no carburettor and nothing to winterise. They charge from the socket you charge your phone from, in a couple of hours for the smaller packs and three to five for the big ones. A Light Bee 2.0 weighs 65kg, which means one person can lift it into a van. For a sport that has spent fifty years losing venues to noise complaints, that list is the whole argument.

Road-legal, at 17, on an A1 licence

The part the headlines never reach: there is a legal way to ride an electric dirt bike on the road, and it starts at 17. An A1 licence covers motorcycles up to 11kW, which you earn with a day's CBT, a theory test and the two-module practical, and it never needs renewing. The Zero XE we sell is listed by Zero for an A1 or a full car licence: 101kg, about 53mph, a removable 4.3kWh battery, ABS, lights, mirrors, a number plate, £5,590. The smaller Zero XB is an AM-licence bike, which an A1 holder also covers, limited to 28mph, £3,890. Both are proper, registered, insurable motorcycles that happen to have knobbly tyres and no exhaust. When Zero's Project Ventura lands next summer it will be an A1 bike as well, with a target price under £8,000; our EICMA post has the detail. Everything else on our floor, Sur-Ron, Talaria, Y-Volt, 79Bike and RFN, is for private land with the owner's permission, and if you ask us whether you can ride one to the shops the answer is no.

Sources: Zero's UK licence listings as shown on our Zero page; GOV.UK licence categories; Direct MX product pages, 5 November 2026.

What we ask of you

Ride the off-road bikes off-road. If you want to ride on the road, buy the bike that is built for it and do the licence; at 17 that is a CBT, a theory test and two mornings at a test centre. Do not modify the controller on a road bike and expect the insurance to hold. Wear a helmet that fits. And if you see a kid on a derestricted Light Bee doing 50 down a pavement with his face covered, do not tell yourself that is what this sport looks like. He is the folk devil of the week, and the Met will be along shortly, on a Sur-Ron.

And if the headlines have put you off, do not let them. A handful of thieves do not get to decide whether you ride something that is quiet, clean, cheap to run and, in the Zeros' case, legal on the road at 17 on an A1 licence. They did not invent these bikes and they do not own them; they just got the coverage, which in this country should surprise nobody. For every thief on a Sur-Ron there are thousands of riders doing nothing more interesting than getting to work on a road-legal Zero, chasing a lap time at the track, or disappearing into the woods on land they are allowed to be on. Come and sit on one. The worst that happens is you enjoy it.

Sources

• MCN: Met Police quintuple Sur-Ron fleet with money seized from criminals
• BBC News: Met gets more e-motorbikes to fight phone thefts
• BBC News: Met using e-bikes and drones to catch phone thieves (71,391 offences)
• Merseyside Police: Operation Gears
• Visordown: new Section 59 powers under the Crime and Policing Act 2026
• Parliament written answer: Home Office holds no data on off-road bike seizures
• Mods and rockers, 1964, and Stanley Cohen's Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972)
• GOV.UK: motorcycle licence categories and ages

Read the full EICMA 2026 electric wrap-up.