Best GPS setup
 

It's a big money maker for those offering it. And a waste of money for the consumer.

I believe GPS units consume energy more than the latest crop of trackers. There are various ones such as the one called Tile. I have experience with Apple Airtags plus one compatible Airtag device. They connect to a nearby iphone, and they secretly tell the iphone (which may belong to a total stranger passing by your Airtag) the location where the Airtag and the iphone met. So if the world gets saturated with iphones, your item will always have its location be known.

One problem with putting anything that uses radio for location is that bicycles are made of metal, and metal attenuates signals. You could hide the tracker inside your frame, but that would make it less useful. When put it in a place that's useful for tracking, you also place it where a thief can see it, remove it, or disable it.

Another problem with these is what to do when you know where your bike is. Suppose you meet your bike with a person on it. Do you assault the person? Detain him and call the police? Knowing where it is, that's a nice thing, even if you're not going to confront your thief, but what is next?

I have an Airtag on my key ring and a wallet card thingy in my wallet. Wouldn't it be nice if they could make one small enough to fit on a pair of eyeglasses? These things are useful to me because I can't find my keys in my home, or I leave it at home and can confirm that it is safe at home. This way I don't have to replace my drivers license and credit cards or change my locks.

E-bike manufacturers should be integrating anti-theft systems, since they can, electronically, make a bike unridable when an alarm is triggered. DelFast e-bikes have an excellent alarm system and disabler; adding a Lo-Jack type GPS tracker would be easy and might be nice, but personally, I wouldn’t bother. The bike is heavy enough that the odds of anyone picking it up and loading it in a van (while it’s screaming at 120db) is awfully low.

Knog have an aftermarket bicycle alarm system called Scout, that, while not e-bike specific, not only integrates Apple Find My tracking with a motion alarm, it also sends an alert to the owner’s iPhone app when in Bluetooth range. That’s pretty perfect for my typical scenarios, like a quick cafe stop or end-of-ride biergarten hang.

I really like the idea of deterring a theft a lot more than tracking one.

Right, and this guy just made an impressive video about how he hacked a bike share bike to work. The company had gone out of business, so there was no documentation. The bike absolutely would not work at all until he hacked it.