Under open sky, a modern GPS tracker will typically place your motorcycle within about 3 to 10 meters — roughly the length of a parking space or two. That's accurate enough to tell you not just which street your bike is on, but which driveway.
Accuracy shifts with conditions, so here's the realistic range:
- Open areas, suburbs, highways: the best case, usually within a few meters.
- Dense city centers: tall buildings reflect satellite signals ("urban canyon" effect), which can stretch the error to tens of meters. Still easily enough to follow a moving bike block by block.
- Indoors or under metal: GPS may not get a clean fix at all, and the tracker may fall back on cell-tower positioning — think neighborhood-level accuracy. Normal, and temporary: the fix sharpens the moment the bike is back outside.
Two things matter as much as raw precision. First, update frequency — a tracker in live mode reporting every few seconds paints a clear trail even if any single point is a few meters off. Second, the movement alert, which needs no accuracy at all to tell you the one thing that matters: your bike is moving and it shouldn't be. For recovery, "that building, right there" is what police need, and that's exactly what GPS delivers.
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