Sam Miller was settling down for the evening in her living room when her phone rang. Did she know that her Range Rover was on the move, asked the caller from Tracker, a vehicle location company.
“I said, ‘Are you sure? Because it’s sitting on my drive,’ ” says Miller, 45, a finance director from Marston Green in the West Midlands. “But when I looked out of the window, the car had disappeared. I don’t want to repeat what I said — there were a few expletives — but I was quite shocked, to say the least.”
When Miller looked at her CCTV system she was in for another shock. The thief had walked up, pulled the door handle and jumped into her two-year-old Autobiography-spec car, which would cost £100,000 new today. He started the engine and, after almost ploughing forwards into Miller’s house, found reverse gear and drove away. The theft was over in less than 30 seconds. Miller’s tracking device led police to the car, which had been parked and abandoned, in less than an hour, but other owners have not been so lucky.
Last week it emerged that some Range Rover owners who park their cars on the street in London are struggling to get insurance because so many of the cars are being stolen. Quantum, a specialist insurer, says that underwriters are refusing to cover the cars because despite hi-tech security systems the vehicles suffer from a catastrophic flaw: they feature keyless entry and keyless start technology that thieves have found ways to bypass, enabling them to steal the cars at will.
The insurer says that unless Range Rovers and other high-end cars with the same technology are parked in a secure garage, the only way to get insurance for them is to combine it with household insurance to spread the risk.
“Stealing these cars is almost child’s play,” says James Wasdell, co-founder of Quantum. “Range Rovers are being targeted because they are desirable, but other cars with keyless systems have the same problem — they just aren’t as high up on thieves’ shopping lists.”
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