Watch the shocking moment thieves drive off in a £70,000 Range Rover in seconds.
The incident took place in St John’s Wood, North London at around 5:30am on Tuesday 9 January.
In the video you see a masked thief being dropped at the scene on the back of a motorbike, before using a crow bar to force the window open and jump into the drivers seat of the Black 4×4.
The CCTV footage, published on X by ‘London and UK Street News’, see the criminals start the engine and fleeing the scene in opposite directions – all in under a minute.
Data from the DVLA revealed in May that Range Rovers are increasingly high-profile targets for thieves, with the Velar R-Dyn model being the most sought out car by criminals, with two in every 100 of the model stolen.
The incident took place in St John’s Wood, North London at around 5:30am on Tuesday 9 January
A masked thief being dropped at the scene on the back of a motorbike, before using a crow bar to force the window open and jump into the drivers seat of the Black 4×4
Land Rover was the most stolen brand, with 924 stolen per 100,000 in the 12 months to March 2023.
Separate data from LeaseLoco in February showed there was a 47 per cent jump in the number of Range Rovers reported stolen to police between 2021 and 2022 – a rise from 3,754 to 5,533.
Alongside this Range Rovers are seeing a sharp decline in price, as owners struggle to get the vehicles insured because of their high theft rate.
The average price of a used Range Rover has fallen 9 per cent since May to £35,224, compared to a decline of 3 per cent for all cars according to Auto Trader.
One couple were forced to sell their nearly brand new top-of-the-range Land Rover at a £14,000 loss after an insurance company cancelled her policy just one month after buying it.
Stay-at-home-mother Hannah Platts, 40, and husband Kareem Chester, 39, bought a new Land Rover Defender for £80,000 in October last year, and after fishing around for an insurance quote, got one for £2,300 a year.
‘The only reason we have an SUV is because where we live is rural. The roads are terrible, they’re full of potholes, they don’t them grit in the winter so it’s dicey to drive,’ Mrs Platts, from the rural village of Audlem, in south Cheshire told .
Land Rover was the most stolen brand, with 924 stolen per 100,000 in the 12 months to March 2023
The average price of a used Range Rover has fallen 9 per cent since May to £35,224, compared to a decline of 3 per cent for all cars according to Auto Trader
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After owning the car for just a few weeks, the couple received an email from insurers Adrian Flux while visiting friends in Sweden in November, which said: ‘We can no longer insure your Land Rover Defender.’
The mother-of-two dedicated an entire day to finding a new quote but the best she found was around £11,000 a year, despite being a ‘model driver’ – but unwilling to pay more than 10 per cent of the car’s value in insurance each year she decided to sell it, even if it meant taking a loss
It comes amid the recent spike in keyless car crime which has seen this become the most common tactic used by organised criminals to steal high-value motors.
It comes after Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) confirmed it will spend £10million in the battle against keyless car thieves by retrofitting older models.
The company, which is owned by Indian giant Tata, said its latest security technology will create a virtual barrier that will block the recent spate of breaches of driverless system in its vehicles.
JLR said its latest anti-theft systems in its newest models manufactured from last year onwards are far less susceptible to breaches of its keyless technology.
The firm also said that since January last year, only 0.07 per cent of new Range Rover and Range Rover Sports on the road with the latest security setup have been stolen, while only 0.3 per cent of new Defenders had been affected since 2020.