Sold Secure Powered Cycle, Explained (and Which Locks Actually Have It)

What Sold Secure actually is

Sold Secure is a physical testing and certification house in Rugby, England. It was established in 1992 by Northumbria and Essex Police with backing from the Home Office, and it is now owned and administered by the Master Locksmiths Association, a not-for-profit trade association. Manufacturers submit products, Sold Secure's technicians run manual attack testing against defined tool lists, and products that survive get an approval at a named grade. The results feed insurers, crime prevention officers, and the approved-product database anyone can search at soldsecure.com.

Two things make it the reference standard for bike locks specifically. First, it is the rating UK insurers write directly into policy terms: many bicycle and e-bike policies require a lock of a specific Sold Secure grade before theft is covered at all. Second, it is one of only two widely recognized independent lock certifications in this market, alongside the Dutch ART foundation. When a lock maker says a lock is "rated," this is almost always the rating they mean.

One thing Sold Secure is not: a publisher of test data. It certifies pass or fail at a grade. It does not publish how long each lock survived, which tools finally defeated it, or how close a pass was. Keep that in mind for the whole rest of this article.

The tier system: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond

Sold Secure grades every product category on up to four tiers. Its own descriptions, from soldsecure.com:

• Bronze: resists the opportunist thief using a basic tool list. Normal-risk situations.
• Silver: resists a more determined thief, longer test, enhanced tool list.
• Gold: resists the dedicated thief, extensive attack with heavy-duty tools.
• Diamond: the highest level, tested against the most determined attack with specialist tools.

What separates the tiers is time and tools: each grade is tested against a defined tool list for a defined duration, and the lists and durations escalate as you go up. Sold Secure does not publish the specific times or the full tool lists for any tier. You will see confident numbers repeated around the internet; they are not on Sold Secure's pages, and we are not going to launder them into fact here.

The grades live inside product categories, and the category matters as much as the color. A "Gold" padlock, a "Gold" bicycle lock, and a "Gold" motorcycle lock passed three different tests. Which brings us to the category this article exists for.

What the Powered Cycle category is, and why it exists

Powered Cycle is Sold Secure's category for locks protecting motorcycles, motor scooters, and e-bikes. It used to be called the Motorcycle rating; Sold Secure officially updated the name to Powered Cycle in 2022, broadening it to cover the machines that now sit between bicycles and motorbikes in weight, speed, and price. A commuter e-bike is routinely a $2,000 to $6,000 machine that parks at the same racks a $400 pedal bike does. It is worth motorcycle money and locked like a bicycle. The category exists to close that gap.

Powered Cycle only comes in two grades, Gold and Diamond, and the difference between them is the single most important fact in this article:

• Powered Cycle Gold is described by Sold Secure as high-level resistance against the dedicated thief, an extensive attack using heavy-duty tools.
• Powered Cycle Diamond is the most in-depth attack test Sold Secure runs on locks in this space, with an extended tool list that includes angle grinders, power tools, and machine-based testing.

Read that again: the angle grinder, the tool responsible for the modern wave of e-bike theft, enters the official test protocol at exactly one consumer tier, Powered Cycle Diamond. Every tier below it can be earned by a lock that has never faced a grinder in certification.

Powered Cycle vs. the bicycle ratings

Sold Secure runs a separate Pedal Cycle category (formerly Bicycle) with all four tiers, Bronze through Diamond. The two ladders overlap in a way the badge stickers do not explain, and Sold Secure states it plainly on its own ratings page: Powered Cycle Gold and Pedal Cycle Diamond offer the same level of security, tested with the same tools, attack methods, and time limits. Same test, two names.

So the real single ladder, bottom to top, looks like this:

1. Pedal Cycle Bronze
2. Pedal Cycle Silver
3. Pedal Cycle Gold
4. Pedal Cycle Diamond = Powered Cycle Gold
5. Powered Cycle Diamond

This is why a "Diamond rated" claim on a product page tells you less than it appears to. A Pedal Cycle Diamond lock and a Powered Cycle Diamond lock both get marketed with the word Diamond, and one of them passed a categorically harder test than the other. When you shop for an e-bike lock, the question is never "is it Diamond?" It is "Diamond in which category?" For an e-bike worth real money, Powered Cycle is the rating that maps to what you own, and for city parking, Powered Cycle Diamond is the only tier that certifies against the attack you are actually worried about.

How we verified this list, and what we could not confirm

Every row above was checked in July 2026 against Sold Secure's public approved-product database (soldsecure.com) where we could find the listing, and against the maker's own product page for the rating claim and the weight claim. Weights are the manufacturers' numbers, not ours; we have not put any of these locks on a scale yet.

Two honest caveats:

• ABUS Granit Super Extreme 2500. ABUS's US product page shows a Sold Secure Diamond badge without naming the category, and multiple independent outlets report it as Powered Cycle Diamond, but we could not find its listing in our search of Sold Secure's database. Until we can point at the certifier's own record or an explicit category claim from ABUS, we are flagging it rather than asserting it.
• This list is not exhaustive. Sold Secure's Powered Cycle category also contains heavyweight motorcycle chains from brands like Pragmasis, Almax, Oxford, and Squire that rarely make sense to carry on an e-bike. We focused on locks a rider might actually mount to a frame or carry in a pannier. If a lock is missing that you think belongs here, tell us and we will run the same verification on it.

Sold Secure's own database is the canonical source, and listings change as products are added, revised, or retired. Treat any third-party list, including this one, as a snapshot with a date on it.

What certification cannot tell you

Sold Secure certification is genuinely useful, and it is also routinely oversold. Three limits worth stating plainly:

• Certified does not mean ungrindable. Every lock on this page, including every Powered Cycle Diamond lock, can be defeated by an angle grinder given enough time, discs, and nerve. The grinder-resistant composites in the newest locks (Litelok's Barronium, Hiplok's graphene-reinforced hardened steel, ABUS's tungsten carbide compound) change how long that takes and how many discs it costs the thief. They do not change whether.
• The structure is industry-funded. Manufacturers apply and pay to have their products tested, and Sold Secure is owned by a locksmiths' trade association. That does not make the testing dishonest; the Master Locksmiths Association is a not-for-profit, and insurers stake real money on the results. But it does mean the incentive is certification, not consumer-facing data. A pass/fail badge system funded by the people earning the badges will never volunteer the messy middle: which Diamond lock barely passed and which one shrugged the test off.
• No published attack times means no ranking. Because Sold Secure does not release durations or margins, two Powered Cycle Diamond locks are officially identical even if one of them survives a grinder several times longer than the other. The certification floor is public; the differences above the floor are invisible.

That third gap is the entire reason this site's Security Lab exists. Our plan, stated before any of it has happened: buy these locks at retail, put them in a vise, and run timed, on-camera power-tool destruction to measure exactly the certified-vs-certified differences the badge system cannot show. We have not run a single test yet. When we have, this page will link to the numbers.

Why this page is the spine of our lock reviews

Every lock review we publish from here on will locate the lock on the ladder this article describes: which Sold Secure category, which grade, verified in the database, before we say anything else about it. Certification is the floor. Our timed destruction testing, when it exists, will be the part above the floor: the same grinder, the same discs, the same vise, a clock, and a camera, applied to certified locks bought at retail with our own money.

Nothing in this article is a test result. It is verification journalism: reading the certifier's own pages, checking the database, and refusing to repeat numbers nobody will stand behind. The moment we have numbers of our own, they will replace the caveats on this page. If there is a lock you want on the bench for the first round, tell us.