11:35 am, September 27, 2022
I was reading a newspaper article recently about the most stolen cars in Britain and on the top of the tree was the Range Rover Sport, which despite having a security system that the manufacturer will tell you is stronger than that of Fort Knox, is a car that appears to go missing every five minutes.
That’s because these days your average car thief is a technological wizard; someone who can use a computer to remotely tell the car to ‘open sesame’ and – poof! – it’s gone in seconds.
It’s hardly the best bit of news for Land Rover, as the Range Rover Sport has been top of this particular list for the past three years.
Sure, it proves that the Birmingham-built battlecruisers are still extremely desirable, but the fact that they attract the undesirables isn’t going to help your insurance premium.
This is nothing new, though. Back in the 1990s, when car theft was as fashionable as a Global Hypercolor T-shirt (those strange ones that made your sweat patches change colour), the Range Rover badge was equally as desirable with ne’er-do-wells.
Indeed, the article brought back an amusing memory, albeit one that wasn’t funny at the time.
It would have been the early 2000s, shortly after I’d left main dealer world and was working with a business associate running an independent site on the outskirts of Birmingham.
Back then, my work colleague had a very good ‘in’ with a finance and repo company and we’d frequently source vehicles that had been lifted from outside the owner’s home, because in trying to keep up with the Joneses they’d failed to keep up with their repayments.
The cars would be sold off at auction and we’d have to get them ready for sale, which would mean applying for all the relevant paperwork and also, quite often, getting new sets of keys cut.
One of the cars that we got via this medium was an old P38a Range Rover. You know, the ones that look like those old square taxis, Metrocabs, that never really took off.
The one we got was a lovely spec – a black Vogue SE with all the bells, toys and whistles – but with no keys.
The problem was that back then, the security system in Range Rovers was different to that of any other car.
Because car crime was so rife in the 1990s, some electrical wizards over at Solihull had concocted a system whereby if you didn’t have the correct key, ECU or electronic code, you’d have no fighting chance of starting the Range Rover whatsoever.
That is, unless you knew how to interrogate the system and had a bit of insider knowledge.
Our usual locksmith was completely flummoxed and refused to touch it, so we asked around the trade and were finally put in touch with a character called Keith, who we were told was ‘the man’ when it came to reaching the parts that other locksmiths couldn’t reach.
A couple of days later, Keith turned up at our site with a couple of Range Rover key blanks and a weird black box with flashing lights on it.
He managed to laser-cut the keys by using lock picks in the door barrel, which was clever stuff, but the real witchcraft began when he got his black box out.
Being a sociable chap, I took Keith a cup of tea and watched as he used the two new keys to take a reading from the car’s ECU feed into the black box and back out the other side.
Big Mike and his colleague would frequently get vehicles that had been taken from owners who, in trying to keep up with the Joneses, had failed to keep up with their repayments
According to Keith, the black box was essentially a code trapper that would read the signals from both key and ECU and get them to talk to each other. For the technology available at the time, it was really clever.
‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘How did you come up with such a thing?’
‘Past experience,’ said Keith, rather bluntly.
‘Of what?’ I quipped. ‘Being a car thief?’
To which he replied – rather too tersely, it has to be said – ‘Look, do you want this bloody thing fixing or not?’
Chastened, I waddled back to the portable building and decided I wasn’t going to go back to him with the plate of biscuits I’d set aside, and instead would sit there and eat them myself, just to spite his miserable attitude.
An hour later, Keith was done. A man of few words, he gave me two keys, said ‘them ones work’ and I wiped the biscuit crumbs from my tie and gave him £150 cash.
The keys did indeed work a treat – the Range Rover locked and unlocked perfectly and started first time, so that evening I took it home to make sure that it was working properly and suitable for retail.
Having determined that it was, in fact, a really good example, we spent the following morning giving it the full works, and by early afternoon the Range Rover was in pride of place at the front of our lot, reversed up on to our ‘Car of the Week’ podium to show it off as our star attraction.
The following morning, though, it was no longer there.
Nor did my colleague know where it was, so we summoned the local constabulary, who took it upon themselves to tell us what we already knew – that Range Rovers were very popular with car thieves.
They also said that the only way to steal this particular model would be if someone had access to the ECU code or key – at which point the penny dropped.
Sadly, and unsurprisingly, the contact details given to us by Keith the thief were phoney – unlike his phone, which was far less phoney by virtue of having been smashed to pieces and later found in a dustbin in Erdington.
I’d paid him in cash so had no invoice and he had pretty much ceased to exist.
Yes, that’s right. I’d actually paid a man to steal my own car…
This feature appears in the current edition of Car Dealer – issue 175 – along with news, views, reviews and much, much more! Click here to read and download it for free!
