Interesting article in the DT today on car insurance.
How Range Rovers became virtually uninsurable
Thefts of the car have risen so much that affordable insurance is just not possible
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 gotten so bad that the Solihull 4x4 maker is now even offering its 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. Motor 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.
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“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.
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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.”
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.