The 'E' Type Forum

Following on from the spate of thefts I am thinking of one of these small portable trackers and movement alert, available from E Bay and Amazon. Has anyone purchased one of the cheaper ones and have any feedback? As I have a few different classics I quite fancy the idea of one that I can take on and off each car. As for the 3.8 which is still running Positive earth , I doubt a hard wired version would work. I know there have been some chats about this previously but many of the links to products are dead now, hence the bounce of the topic.

I also have been considering this.
In my view you need one with a SIM card in it.
I haven't found anything that jumps out at me though.

All are pretty compromised in that a SIM version needs a mobile signal which can be patchy and will not work in a steel structure like a container. GPS needs to see the sky so useless in a covered truck, garage or container - GPS jammers cost £35 on eBay. You best bet is to invest in a proper tracking system from one of the major specialists like Tracker but unlike a modern car hiding the transmitter in an E-Type will be difficult as everything is so exposed or can easily be exposed. The professional thieves are way ahead of you and short of posting a guard there is not much you can do (and even that did not work for Pete Crespin - two cars from locked occupied premises over a period of 4 hours. £500 in cash can turn a lot of heads!)

Forget it, use the car and make sure you have agreed value insurance. You can always buy another as the cars are not that rare. Just make sure you don't fall into the trap the owners of other stolen cars fell into - leaving the vehicle in a public place for a long time giving the thieves time to plan.

yes wise words, but it still a car I don't want to lose. years of work restoring it is not going to be easily replaced with someone else work and I don't have another 2 years spare! I wanted to take the missus on a couple of trips, maybe Honfleur or Cotswolds and don't want to be up all night worrying about it outside some hotel. That said it won't be a Premier Inn so maybe these places have suitable security . And what did we decide a steering wheel cover being the best?

It is all about playing the odds. Most Hotels we have used in our travels have private parking and the one in Honfleur (the superb b&b Hotel Lecrin - book well in advance) has electrically operated gates at night.


We generally avoid city hotels and look for those in the countryside because there are fewer people and even less organised gangs. A fuel pump immobiliser is all we have ever used - it has caught me out innumerable times - although I sometimes take the steering wheel to the room with me (but you do look a complete prat!). No room in an OTS for a Disclock or similar and to me they shout out "look at me I am a really valuable car and my owner is going to be away for hours". I take the view that 99.9% of passers by are a) honest and b) think the car can't be that valuable if it is left in the street with the hood down!

Happy to advise on Hotels in France if you need help choosing.

Hotel Clery is another of our favourites:


Details of this great little tour may help: viewtopic.php?p=9776#p9776

Hi Andrew.....so plenty of options to stop a casual thief, fuel switch, steering lock ect.....its the professional that will put it on a trailer... (tracker got guaranteed to get a signal)..my mobile vary rarely works at my home.....so its down to make it difficult to get it on a trailer......think about how you park it up over night, on an angle/ front end in etc then even remove a road wheel, might sound daft but only takes a few minutes

On all trips with the E we have always selected hotels with a private parking.
The risk of parking on the open public space is not limited to the car theft only...
And as David highlighted, trackers with a sim need no catch a signal, you cannot place these inside a metallic space (such as boot or door or under bonnet or bumper...). But if located in other places, they would. And when properly programmed they would promptly send a signal (text message on your mobile) as soon as the car is moved few meters with the gps location. So, as not all thieves highly qualified for their job or fully equipped, there is a utility nevertheless.

I have been thinking about a transmission immobilizer, controlled with a lock behind the gear shift: some sort of rod that would drop in the uj behind the gearbox blocking rear wheels rotation, and of course combined with an ignition cut-off switch. Or simply blocking the gearshift in reverse (old Saab cars had this).
A worthwhile idea for the wiser fellows around?

Ah, great feedback chaps, thanks. Good heads up on the Hotel in Honfleur. I will look into that. We need to get half term out of the way and then we are free to have a nice long weekend. Living not far from the coast makes a dash to France very easy. Good advice on parking the E in difficult locations for a thief to get away with it, and I like the prop shaft lock although would worry me about accidental deployment at speed. Ouch

Local South East TV had a program on the theft of Land Rovers. They literally strip the LR down to its constituent parts in a couple of hours and either ship them out as parts or as Steve mentioned they get them into a container where the GPS will not work. However, they interviewed a chap whose company had developed a tracker that could not be jammed, could not be scanned , and could be hidden as any electrical component, such as a bulb, relay, light switch etc. It could also be found within a container. They illustrated the exercise and did appear to work.

this is the episode which is currently not available on Iplayer but may come back on again
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08bq9z1

I will see if I can find out about the new gismo and post it up here.

It's all about mitigating the risks. We will never be able to make them 100% unstealable, but we can lower the chances of it.

By thinking of all the different possibilities we should not let that put us of fitting devices to mitigate against at least some of the possibilities.

I see this all too often in our IT industry. Too busy trying to think of all the scenarios and mitigate against them and they give up on cost / complexity grounds only to have forgotten to at least add the basics.

What is the general view on wheel clamps? What is the best brand/style for an e-type?

I have a removeable steering wheel on my car but am thinking about a wheel clamp for extra security. Sure it won't stop someone with time and an angle grinder but hopefully using one of those in a public space will still be noticed and defer some from having a go.

Thanks

Myles

My wife is from Hungary and I've been going there for over twenty years. Years ago I was woken by a car alarm and it turned out it was my Passat. Lazily I had left it on street rather than in our secluded parking. They stole the lock barrel in one door and the police told us the game was they would get a key to fit and then steal the car the next night. It was lucky I spotted the passenger door lock was missing. I was flying home that day so we dropped the car at a dealer near the airport and got all the locks changed. Costly but not as much as a lost car the next day!!!

Hiding your asset is the best way. If they can't see it they can't plan to steal it. I park my expensive BMW in the secluded space every year and no-one's touched it.

John

mylesw wrote:What is the general view on wheel clamps? What is the best brand/style for an e-type?

I have a removeable steering wheel on my car but am thinking about a wheel clamp for extra security. Sure it won't stop someone with time and an angle grinder but hopefully using one of those in a public space will still be noticed and defer some from having a go.

Thanks

Myles

I believe solenoid operated plunger door locks in combination with road wheel locks are the only arrangement that realistically affords a modicum of protection. The rest are easily foiled by a professional thief. Plunger locks in the B-post cavities and into the door jamb keep the bad guys out of the cabin....especially for an FHC. If the cabin can't be accessed, the engine compartment is out of reach.

Wheel locks made from hardened steel make a grinder a noisy, time consuming.... and therefore risky proposition for a thief. I've been looking at fabricating a pair using a variation on Lionel's wheel nut tool (but machined in steel) as a starting point. A second machined gizmo with prongs would projecting inward between the spokes would lock to the "nut removal tool". The prongs interfere with wheel rotation...the wheel nut can't be removed because it's all locked together. One lock front and rear. Dragging the car off from either end would be an unwieldy proposition and probably wreck the wheel. The device could be fairly compact.

Get the spinners re-engraved with the 'lossen' arrow pointing the other way.

Anybody used one of these... http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Genuine-Track ... SwL7VWs8TR

They only have Bluetooth and it transmits to any mobile device with the app installed on it which is within range but uses the mobile's GPS rather than its own. If it gets stolen you activate it and then it will transmit the location using the nearest mobile device. It works anywhere in the world theoretically but relies on a mobile device being within range at some point but there are probably more mobile devices now than people on the planet.

The battery lasts a year and doesn't need to be powered off the car battery so you can hide it more easily. It's also very cheap and even Halfords sell them.

I haven't bought one because I don't have a smart phone or any other mobile device and my car is in a thousand bits!!

Been mentioned on here befor.....Usefull to put on your keyring incase you lose them in the house, but it will only work if you have the app on your phone and all the other phones.....maybee in the future if the app becomes standard on all phones it could then be great

You need one of these: http://senturionkey.com/

Prices start at £38,000!

What ever next.........a key coded suppository......a qiuck squeez and your in id pay good money to see that sales video

mgcjag wrote:Been mentioned on here befor.....Usefull to put on your keyring incase you lose them in the house, but it will only work if you have the app on your phone and all the other phones.....maybee in the future if the app becomes standard on all phones it could then be great

That's the thing though (if their claims are accurate) it's already on millions of devices across the world.

The problem this is a RFIS 'crowd service' which requires people to download the app and there are multiple vendors (eight at the last count) who are not inter-operable :

"If you’re unlucky enough to have actually lost your item in question (it’s no longer anywhere in range of your phone), then you can declare to every other phone out there that uses this same RFID tag technology that it is missing and that their phone should “keep a digital eye out” for it. What this means is that if someone else walks by your lost item and their phone detects the unique identifier of your lost item, it silently reports back to a central server which then notifies you in turn of its location.

This is a very clever idea, yet has some implications to it:

The more people who run the app on the phone, the better it works.

Works better in cities than in rural areas because there are more people in urban areas. More phones with the app scanning means better likelihood of the missing item being found.

Different RFID tag vendors are not inter-operable (eg. Tile doesn’t work with Protag and vice-versa) — By proxy, a more popular RFID fob manufacturer will have a larger user base running the app which means a better chance of finding the missing item.

Also, for this to work, the app is always running in the background on your phone possibly draining your battery power faster.

When your phone finds a lost item of someone else, your GPS location is silently sent back to the manufacturers’ servers. (Hopefully anonymized…)"

They are great for finding lost keys around the house but finding a car ..................