Motorsport results aside, it is unusual for carmakers to issue press releases on Sundays - but Land Rover was sufficiently moved by a recent freedom of information request relating to stolen car figures that it made a point of sharing the DVLA data itself. Its reasoning was simple enough: despite appearing three times in the UK’s top ten most stolen cars of 2023, the numbers suggested that across its four Range Rover branded models, the official reckoning recorded a 20 per cent decline in thefts.
Even more conveniently for Land Rover, the largest falls were recorded by the big ticket cars: thefts of the Range Rover Sport and the flagship Range Rover dropping by 28.6 and 27.2 per cent in the last 12 months. Significantly, the latter didn’t even make it into the top ten. And while 1,631 examples of the Range Rover Sport were still taken - making it the fifth most stolen model in the UK, narrowly ahead of the Evoque in sixth - Land Rover is clearly pleased that the £10m investment it pledged last year to updating the security features of ‘more than 75,000 older client vehicles’ has seemingly paid off.
“The rapid decline in Range Rover thefts in the last year, demonstrates the strength of our latest vehicle security measures,” said Patrick McGillycuddy, JLR’s UK Managing Director. “These significant reductions are a result of engineering our new vehicles to be robust against all known theft methods through the latest anti-theft technology, endorsed by third-party experts like Thatcham. In fact, our latest data shows that only ten out of 12,200 of the latest model of Range Rovers have been stolen since January 2022.”
Plainly there is still work to do - not least because 954 reported thefts of the Discovery Sport were a 15.2 per cent rise compared to 2022 and saw it finish 10th on the list - but Land Rover insists that the rollout of updates will continue nationwide, and suggests that there have been ‘zero’ reported thefts of any JLR vehicle using the widely reported key signal ‘relay’ method since it introduced Ultra-Wide Band tech to its cars in 2018.
The number of Range Rovers stolen became a hot-button issue for the manufacturer early last year when it was claimed that some owners living in London were struggling to find affordable insurance for the flagship model after DVLA figures revealed it was the second most taken vehicle after the Ford Fiesta in 2022 (which again tops the list in 2023, owing mostly to its ubiquity on British roads).
Alongside the drop in recorded theft prompted by improved security measures, Land Rover can point to the re-introduction of a JLR branded insurance scheme last October aimed at helping its customers find a suitable policy, and McGillycuddy reports the firm is “also funding hundreds of thousands of pounds on additional policing to tackle the root causes - by stopping the flow of stolen cars in and out the country, to benefit all UK drivers”. Apparently, we need the help: globally, between 2021 and 2022, vehicle thefts were said to have increased by 59 per cent across all manufacturers.
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