For London motorist Stratis Alisafakis, the explanation for the disappearance of the badge on his Volkswagen Golf GTI was painfully clear.
Overnight, a thief had walked up to the front of the vehicle parked outside his home in Ealing, yanked off the badge complete with the assembly behind it and walked off.
The whole operation – recorded on Mr Alisafakis’s doorbell camera – took less than five seconds.
But it wasn’t the badge itself that the criminal wanted. This isn’t the 1980s, when there was a spate of thefts of VW badges after American hip-hop band the Beastie Boys turned them into a fashion item by wearing them around their necks.
Instead, it was a little sensor that the thieves were after. This device fits behind the VW badge and, connected to the engine only by slender wires, it comes away with it all too easily.
This is the part that controls the ‘adaptive cruise-control system’, which sounds a warning and slows the car if software judges it is too close to the vehicle in front.
Losing the cruise-control sensor to a thief aware of their resale value has become an occupational hazard for VW owners – and an expensive one at that.
When Tara O’Driscoll had the badge and sensor on her Golf stolen from outside her home in Clapham, south London, she posted about the theft on a local social media site and received no fewer than 50 responses from others who’d had a similar experience.
She was quoted £1,600 to replace the part, although some motorists wrote to say they had received quotes of twice that.
While cheaper sensors can be found online – for between £100 and £300 –they have to be fitted by a dealership because they need to be programmed to work with the car.
In any case, anyone tempted to go down that route risks feeding a lucrative criminal enterprise – the chances are that the sensor you buy online will itself have been stolen from a car and sold on.
It is easy to ask: how come cars can still be so vulnerable to criminals when they are supposed to be packed with anti-theft devices?
They have alarms, immobilisers, tracking devices, sophisticated key fobs – which are very good at locking legitimate owners out of their cars, as well as thieves – but apparently nothing to prevent an expensive part simply being pulled out from behind the radiator grille.
VW-owners are so angry at the company’s failure to address the problem that they have signed a petition at change.org, a website that allows people to solicit support for their campaigns.
Alisafakis, who started this online protest, says the company has tried to fob him off with a standardised response: ‘While we empathise with your situation, our data doesn’t indicate a nationwide rise in thefts; rather, it seems, these might be isolated incidents by persistent criminals.’
The thefts can’t be that isolated, however: the petition currently has 103 signatories.
The spate of thefts will do nothing to improve Volkswagen’s already tarnished reputation. After all, it is still reeling from the ‘Dieselgate’ scandal, when it was caught out installing software on cars that enabled them to ‘cheat’ on emissions tests.
To date, the scandal has cost VW more than £25 billion, a figure that includes the cost of buying back 300,000 cars from US motorists and dealerships. But, to be fair to VW, it is not the only company whose cruise-control sensors have proved easy prey for thieves.
BMW and Honda owners have also complained about such thefts. In one case, thieves managed to steal the devices from 17 cars parked on the forecourt of a Honda dealership in Portland, Oregon. And cruise-control sensors are not the only devices that criminals are after.
Car theft has evolved in response to all the security bling that is now built into cars: for many criminal gangs it no longer makes sense to lift an entire vehicle but to steal individual parts.
While the security devices fitted to modern cars have contributed to a large fall in the number of vehicles being stolen in England and Wales over the past two decades – down from 231,323 in 2004-05 to 121,825 in 2024-25 – those figures, produced by the Office for National Statistics, are for the theft of complete vehicles, not valuable parts.
A 2022 study by insurance company Direct Line, based on freedom of information requests to 45 policing authorities, found that 474,600 vehicle parts had been stolen the previous year.
The number one item in this league table of thefts was the humble number plate: 53,400 of which were spirited away.
Although such thefts cause a lot of hassle for the victims, as they are stolen principally to create clone vehicles and so evade speeding fines and the like, they don’t cost a lot to replace. Ditto car batteries. While airbags –often described as ‘the new car stereos’ due to how easy they are to steal – are relatively cheap to replace, there can be a substantial associated cost, as thefts often involve smashing through a side window. The same problem applies to the theft of car seats and GPS systems.
The people car owners really don’t want to become victims of are the wheel-stealers. As they have to keep the car elevated as the wheels are removed one by one, anyone who falls foul of them will return to a car mounted on bricks.
But, even so, wheels are relatively cheap to replace.
It’s a different story when it comes to the second most commonly stolen vehicle part: catalytic converters. Thieves are attracted by the precious metals they contain, including platinum and rhodium. Just under 40,000 were stolen from cars in 2021 and they cost up to £1,300 to replace.
More recently, headlamps from luxury cars have proved to be a lucrative target.
The industry has even given the theft of headlamps a name: ‘eye-snatching’. Like cruise-control sensors, they are extremely easy to steal from some models.
A YouTube video which went viral shows a thief drawing up in front of a Porsche, ripping out both headlamps, stuffing them in the boot of his own car and driving away. The whole operation took less than 30 seconds and required no tools whatsoever – the thief did it all with his bare hands.
Thefts like these are encouraged by the fact that, with modern cars, the sum of the parts is often markedly higher than the value of the whole vehicle – at least if you sell the parts individually at retail price.
LED headlamps in luxury cars can cost £3,000 each to replace – which could well mean that a pair of them are worth as much as a tenth of the value of the entire vehicle.
And, in the case of headlamps, there is a market which stretches beyond selling them as secondhand parts to motorists. A pair of Porsche headlamps stolen in Germany were found to have been used as grow lamps – which provide substitute sunlight – in an indoor cannabis farm.
The appeal of stealing car parts has been increased by their growing sophistication. Vehicles today are brim full of hi-tech systems, from collision-warning devices to lane-departure alerts. None of these can be operated without computers and sensors: a typical modern car might have a hundred computers.
Is there really nothing that can be done to secure these valuable electronics? BMW UK tells me that ‘it continuously innovates and strengthens the layers of security across our vehicle range, although we do not publicly disclose all of these security measures because maintaining secrecy is crucial to staying ahead of the criminals’.
Fair enough, although some owners might want to know: couldn’t you at least put in a few screws to slow down thieves who prey on cruise-control units?
Volkswagen UK insists that the number of replacement sensors being ordered ‘is a only a handful per month, per retailer, across the country’.
Only a couple of dealerships in London are seeing a high number, which it says, ‘supports the observation that these thefts are highly localised’.
It also says that, as each sensor is chassis-stamped, a dealer should receive an alert if it has been reported stolen.
But thieves must be finding some use for the devices, otherwise they would not keep on stealing them.
The car thief of old went around with a monkey wrench and a basic knowledge of how to hot-wire a vehicle. Astonishingly, given the sophistication of modern technology, many now seem to have built lucrative careers using nothing more than brute strength.