Please note: The content of this article is only to advise you. Should to wish to implement any advice, you do so at your own risk. Please ensure you follow the law at all times.
Unattended Items
Don’t leave bags, valuables, passports (very popular) or expensive jackets on show in your car. Handbags on passenger seats need to be relegated to under seats or deep in the foot-well whilst driving. Someone can open a door, smash a window or snatch something from the back of a moving motorbike so fast you will not have time to react! I can assure you that one of the most annoying things you will ever have in your car is broken door glass. Hardened glass shatters into hundreds of tiny fragments and it gets everywhere. It will spend months making reappearances from obscure places, or be forever rattling around inside a door shell. Replacement will be sure to be lower than your insurance excess, meaning that you will pay it all out of YOUR OWN POCKET too! If it’s an unusual car, don’t expect companies to keep your glass in stock either, leaving your car vulnerable to weather and anyone with a blade for days or maybe weeks as you drive around with a ‘plastic sheet window’!
Your vehicle’s boot
Most vehicle boots automatically open with your doors, and you may have had someone watch you throw your laptop in and then strap yourself firmly into the driver’s seat! Boot locks normally have a keyed-only-override position or a small switch on the mechanism inside the boot, so why not use it? Read your vehicle handbook or Google it to find out!
Locking the vehicle
When you press your car locking remote fob you can hear the lock solenoids click shut. Take a moment to look and make sure it has actually locked. If, for instance, a passenger door was closed late, or a seatbelt caught in a lock, the car may auto unlock again. (Some vehicles beep the horn to indicate a lock malfunction). I accidentally did it with my Vauxhall whilst writing this article and it did unlock again.
Here is another trick you may not know if the car was bought without a handbook or you couldn’t be bothered to read it. TRY PRESSING THE LOCK BUTTON A SECOND TIME AND LISTEN FOR ANOTHER CLUNK. Vauxhalls, Hondas and many other makes, especially convertible models have a secondary DEADLOCK. This means the doors will not open even if a window is smashed and the door handle is pulled from inside the car!
Remote fob readers
There are available, again on the internet, remote fob readers that if used simultaneously, as you arm your vehicle, that can read and duplicate the signal code, giving them a clone of your remote. This is the tool of the professional thief so please read the section below regarding additional, non-standard devices, for the ‘Belt and Braces’ approach, which may just prevent the theft of your desirable vehicle.
Common trick used to steal a car
A common trick used in the past with ‘rocker’ or movement sensor alarms was for someone to disturb your car and then hide, setting off the alarm in this way, repeatedly, until you give up and key lock the vehicle without arming the alarm system. This gave them freedom to spend time stealing the car and quietly driving away. Nowadays many systems auto engage after a period, overcoming this trick. Many vehicles now also auto lock when the car drives off, to prevent door openers / hijackers etc.