malcolmw

When I renewed my insurance the other day, there was a supplement to the policy covering just this type of theft.

I have just renewed my insurance with Elephant. On a like for like basis they offered £550 against £430 last year but have put up my excess from £310 to £600. Confused resulted in all quotes being £750 or above with excesses of typically £750. So, all in all, I don't think Elephant's offer was too bad given the horror stories elsewhere.

I am sure that you will have no problems. I leave my LC500 on a trickle charger all the time when I am not using it. I used the same regime when I had an Aston DB9 and when I sold it after 12 years, it still had the original battery fitted. The charger floats the battery at 13.8V (after a short balancing charge) and this is below the gassing voltage so electrolyte is not lost over the long term.

I had a phase of regularly seeing other LC500s but this seems to have dropped off recently. They definitely aren't common though.

Yes, as Spock66 says. Mine only goes out when it is dry. 🙂

Yes,15 months here but it is a great car. 😀

I must say that they don't bother me at all (I also live in a very rural area). The NX300h had very poor restoration of main beam when turning into a dark lane which I found to be much more of a problem. I am glad to say that the NX350h has much faster response when the headlamps are in AHBC mode.

I don't know if anyone remembers the Schwarzenegger film The Running Man? On the original version was a short scene (removed later) at the start pretending to be an advert as part of the TV program of the film's subject. The ad was for a car security system which converted the driving seat of your car to an electric chair if you tried to drive away without the correct key. Just priceless.

My firm supplies jump start units to the AA and we have it on good authority that the major reason for call outs on BEVs and Hybrids is the 12V battery being flat. The manufacturers have been just too penny pinching with the Ah capacity of the 12V (or to save weight).

Only the hands...?

I am not as tight as you in my garage but I use two house bricks on an old carpet to position my LC exactly every time and should work in forwards or reverse. This method seems repeatably accurate to about 1 cm. The carpet is to stop the bricks shifting on the garage floor.

I think the remote heating is only 10 minutes on the 350h as it has a smaller battery. The 450h will be able to support the seat heaters and screen/mirror heaters for longer.

The LC is 1920mm wide or 2168 over the mirrors. I have a double garage and park mine in the centre so that I can get out when I open the doors. 😀

I can hardly believe that I have had my LC500 for 6 years now. I took it for its "big" service the other day at Hedge End and I thought others might like to know the cost involved. My bill was about £850 all in to include: - loan car (new RX450h - (a bit ugly IMO) - all standard service items - wheel alignment check (no adjustment required) - 8 spark plugs changed - diff oil change - brake fluid replaced - general health check - MOT (no advisories) - another year of warranty (LSAW) - wash and vacuum I thought this not too bad compared to some previous "fast cars" that i have owned and it runs as smoothly as ever. I hope this might be of interest to owners of newer cars who might want to hang on to them a bit longer.

I can't comment on on the later suspension revisions but my 2018 LC500 rides pretty comfortably and, of course, you have AVS so you can use Comfort Mode if you want. Regarding the Sport Plus additions, I have driven cars both with and without the LSD and RWS. On the road there is precious little difference that I could detect. If you want to take the car on the track then you might get an improvement to lap times. Versus the LSD, the traction control takes care of wheelspin and do you really want to drift round roundabouts on the public highway?

After you get the second key the car keeps displaying a "New Key Registered" message when you get in. Does anyone know how to supress this or does it just disappear eventually?

I know that this is a bit basic but do you leave the aircon on all the time? This usually dries out the air within the car and thus prevents misting up and condensation. We have no issues with our NX350h with H&V on "Auto". Beware, there is a setting which defaults the aircon off in the auto mode.

As most of the countries taking in stolen vehicles have LHD cars, you might think that our RHD models would be less attractive.

You also have to laugh at their geographical knowledge. Lexus Bournemouth is actually in Poole.

Does the TSK mean that devices such as Carista will not work? Do you have to go to a dealer to update anything?

Whoopee! We now have two keys and locking wheel bolts. We have had to synchronise the new key to the Lexus Link + app and account as otherwise it identifies the user as "Guest" and you won't get the journey data etc saved. We get the "second key registered" pop-up so we will see if this disappears soon as mentioned. We also get the big blue screen asking us to agree to T&Cs but this may also disappear now that everything is registered.

I can understand the RZ move to encourage sales to count towards their minimum percentage of ZEVs but the NX? So, after waiting for 15 months to get a new NX you then effectively get your trade in value trashed by a huge price drop. Not too good on the customer service front is it? The government wont be happy either. There would be NX models now under the £40K extra VED level.

I would more or less echo what eightK has said. I live in a quiet Wiltshire village but put my LC in the garage when not in use. Although a LC has been reported stolen, it is unlikely to be a big target as it is a rare car and not a lot of use in, for example, Nigeria. A "Crooklock" will probably give a thief pause for thought as it will take time and cause a lot of noise to remove. I suspect your car will be more vulnerable on your driveway than out and about as thieves will survey the area for target cars and come back later to actually do the deed if your car is still there. Why would an LC be stolen? To get the parts to repair a damaged one as everything is fantastically expensive and difficult to obtain.

From the Telegraph. Sorry, for the long post. It's not just us! "How Range Rovers became virtually uninsurable Thefts of the car have risen so much that affordable insurance is just not possible Andrew English 11 January 2024 • 10:39am Last November, Land Rover issued a press release about its latest investment in vehicle security, calling owners of post-2018 Land Rovers and Range Rovers to bring them in to have a free enhanced security package fitted. With sales affected and cars left virtually uninsurable, things have got so bad that the Solihull-based 4x4 maker is now even offering Range Rover customers insurance arranged through its own scheme. At about the same time, well let’s just call him Mr X, a London barrister, decided to throw in the towel trying to get insurance on a replacement for the V8 Range Rover he’d had stolen off the street outside his house. “No one seemed at all surprised when the original was stolen,” he says. “I told the police it was a V8 and they asked where I lived. When I said Westminster they weren’t surprised, they said it was probably in Nigeria by now. Neither was the insurance company which paid up the £70,000 value in six weeks without a question. “It was when I found another V8 to buy that I realised why. The insurance quote was £26,000... One of our clerks had a Range Rover Sport stolen. He lives in Essex and it was exactly the same story when he came to reinsure a replacement.” Mr X now drives a Range Rover hybrid. “It isn’t a Range Rover model I particularly like,” he says, “but the insurance is less than a third for that on a V8 and I refuse to have someone else determine what brand of car I drive. I have got a big yellow steering lock, which I hope might be a deterrent. “It’s just ridiculous,” he adds, “this is becoming an epidemic.” Further, he dismisses Land Rover’s update bulletins on security. “We get one a month inviting us to go to a dealer to have the software flashed, but they want you to take your car to the middle of nowhere to have it done, they take the entire day, there’s no courtesy car and you have to make your own way there and back; it’s an absolute pain.” Premium-theft epidemic It should be said that the issue of premium vehicle theft is far from confined to just Land Rover and Range Rover, with Lexus, Mercedes, BMW and Audi models also suffering. Insurer AXA UK says in the period between 2021 and 2023 it has seen Lexus thefts increase by 22 per cent with RX and NX models the most targeted. Land Rover thefts have increased by 80 per cent in the same period with Range Rovers making up 75 per cent of those thefts. The villains’ sights have shifted though, with Hyundai thefts up by 144 per cent and Kia thefts up 106 per cent in the last three months compared with the same period last year. “For newer makes and models, keyless car theft, or relay theft, is at an all-time high and unfortunately it shows no signs of slowing down,” says David Pearce, director of retail direct at AXA UK. “This is particularly apparent with the rise in thefts of models like Range Rover and Lexus in recent years. Technology adds a layer of complexity to claims with many cars now including technical parts which can be more challenging to obtain and replace, as well as more expensive.” In 2022 nearly 100,000 vehicles were stolen in the UK and it’s looking as though this year’s total will be higher. According to a FOI request on behalf of Fleet News magazine, London was the worst place in 2022, with 26,117 vehicles stolen at a rate of 291 per 100,000 people. Next was the West Midlands with 12,223 (417 per 100,000), then Greater Manchester with 7,453 (264 per 100,000). Next up was West Yorkshire with 4,621 thefts, Essex with 3,771 and South Yorkshire with 3,257. According to Octane Finance, after the Ford Fiesta, the next most stolen car was a Range Rover, followed by the Ford Focus, the VW Golf, and Land Rover Discovery. A clear problem Land Rover clearly has a problem, though one spokesperson said this was a case of supply and demand, just too many people want a Range Rover for the factory to supply so the criminal gangs move in to fill that gap. It’s a slightly odd way of looking at it, but Land Rover also claims theft rate of new Range Rovers and Range Rover Sport models is just 0.07 per cent (0.3 per cent for Defenders) and that its vehicles “consistently exceed standards set by Thatcham, the UK’s leading automotive risk intelligence company”. Yet stolen Range Rovers, Land Rovers and other premium SUV models are getting to be quite a talking point in the wealthy middle class, which is a key Land Rover target market. . “We’ve started to park our Range Rover round the back of the house,” said one Berkshire motor trader. “I don’t see the increased insurance premiums so much since our cars are insured on a group policy, but I’ve had clients who’ve given up with Range Rovers.” Indeed we spoke to one former Range Rover owner based in Essex, who was quoted an insurance premium of “well in excess of £30,000 a year”. Cat and mouse game Thatcham doesn’t come out of this too well, either, since it’s clear that its best efforts aren’t good enough. In a statement, the organisation points out the wide variety of causes of rising car crime, including organised criminal gangs, over-stretched police forces, the proliferation of premium cars, the internet and social media platforms which allow gangs to share vehicle vulnerabilities and digital devices which have been reverse engineered. It adds: “When first introduced in the early 1990s, the New Vehicle Security Assessment (NVSA) was highly effective in adding layers of mechanical security to foil opportunistic criminals and reduced theft figures dramatically, from a peak of over 620,000 thefts a year. “The standards set out by the NVSA are still the most exacting in the world. However, the process of identifying and closing down digital security vulnerabilities remains a game of cat and mouse.” Interesting, but this doesn’t do much for Mr X or any of the other premium SUV owners wondering if their prized cars will still be there when they open the front doors and face spiralling insurance premiums. “They’ve become uninsurable,” said one former policeman from one of the UK’s biggest car crime squads. “Land Rover spent over £10 million on updating its keyless unlocking systems a few years ago and for just about three months their vehicles were impregnable until the gangs worked out how to get past it all.” Jaguar Land Rover said that its deployment of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) in 2018 means that vehicles equipped with this technology are not vulnerable to attack via the keyless system. The former police officer’s quote: “Land Rover spent over £10 million on updating its keyless unlocking systems a few years ago and for just about three months their vehicles were impregnable until the gangs worked out how to get past it all.”: As mentioned above there have been no thefts of our vehicles with UWB technology Now that “cat-and-mouse game” of police and thieves has started a new round with criminal gangs, many from Eastern Europe, stealing high-value cars, stripping them out in what the police call “slaughter houses”, putting the parts into containers and shipping them out. Those parts are often fitted to crashed and written off versions of the same models and sold as repaired in the UK, Africa and Europe. How they get away with it One of the most common methods is to exploit the vulnerabilities in the vehicles’ own locking and security systems. This takes the form of intercepting the communication between the key fob and the vehicle and spoofing the signal so the vehicle unlocks itself. There have been various generations of this sort of theft, from jamming the locking signal as the owner walks away leaving the vehicle unlocked and vulnerable, to using a big aerial hidden in the straps of a backpack to “wake up” the key and amplify its signal from your pocket or a sideboard in the house to the target vehicle, which then unlocks itself. Updates to this vulnerable technology have been introduced; building in a confirmation signal system from the vehicle to the key fob, and sophisticated calculations of the key-fob signal delay, but within weeks the thieves have engineered a sneaky work around. The equipment to do this is widely available on the internet, with adverts for key-fob duplicators which will work with or without the key being present and remote code grabbers. Lots of these firms operate out of China and there’s another, based in Lebanon, openly advertising radio remote code grabbers, with the caveat that they are intended “for legal use only”, even though it’s difficult to think of any legal use for such products. Another method is to gain access and reverse engineer a dealer’s emergency start key, which is designed to allow a bona fide dealer to help customers who have lost their key or locked it inside. Again, equipment is available on the internet to do this. Yet another is to cut open the coachwork (the plastic hatchback on a Range Rover) and gain access to the vehicle’s main can-bus internal communications wiring and wire in your own key-fob replicator sourced from, guess where. After gaining access, the villains climb in, start the engine and activate a briefcase-sized jammer which suppresses the signals from the vehicles own GPS and any third party anti-theft software and drive the car to a warehouse. Once there, the thieves activate an even bigger jamming device with about 30 aerials while they find and remove the SIM cards and GPS signal devices, which can be hidden all over the car, often in the roof or the floor. Victimless crime? “There had been an attitude in police forces that this is what insurance is for,” said our former police officer, “but that’s not true, car crime isn’t victimless, everyone else pays more in insurance premiums and these gangs are often into nasty other crimes as well.” So our insurance goes up, with Confused.com reporting a rise of 58 per cent in the last 12 months, with the average cost of comprehensive cover now £924 – an increase of £338 over last year. While the Association of British Insurers gives a by rote response to the issue saying: “The cost of the insurance for any vehicle will depend on the risk factors involved,” Thatcham highlights another issue which several others mentioned and which should strike terror into the hearts of Range Rover owners. “As they have done for the past 100 years or more, insurers typically base premiums on risk factors relating to the driver – from driving history to age and location. However, the balance of risk is beginning to shift from driver to vehicle, disrupting the existing insurance model.” Thatcham bases this on battery cars, which are often written off after quite minor shunts because of the potential risk of a short circuit, the tendency for modern cars to be connected to the internet poses new challenges in time and cost to repair. Shortages of spare parts with concomitant price rises and increases in the price of used vehicles also play their parts. “The only way to address these issues is through concerted cross industry action focused on building sustainability into vehicle design, while adopting a vigilant approach to unexpected emerging repair and security challenges presented by new vehicle technologies.” But for the moment, what can you do? “If they want it, whatever it is, they will take it. But if you make yours harder to steal, they might just move on to the next one,” says our ex-policeman. “I’d recommend a big yellow steering lock.” By coincidence, the winning steering wheel lock in Auto Express magazine’s comprehensive test, the Stoplock Pro Elite, is big and yellow and on sale for £47.99. If I owned a Range Rover, I’d take a serious look at one...

Late July 2023.