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A Range Rover was stolen just one day after its frustrated owner handed the four-year-old model back to a finance company which quoted £14,000 for its insurance.
Business owner Mark Perring, 52, revealed last month that he was being quoted huge amounts for an insurance policy on his four by four after he was told Jaguar Land Rover’s own insurance would not cover him.
The frustrated motorist decided to ditch the car brand for good and bought himself a new Mercedes GLE which he could insure for about a tenth of the price.
Instead of renewing the lease, Mr Perring returned the car to financiers Black Horse, who sent British Car Auctions to pick it up from his home in Loughton, Essex at around 4pm on Wednesday.
He was glad to be rid of the effectively uninsurable Range Rover Sport, but was woken at 2am on Friday with a call from a Met Police officer who asked him: ‘Mr Perring, do you know your car has been stolen?’
Furious Range Rover Mark Perring (his car pictured) owner has said he was quoted £14,000 for an insurance policy on his four-year-old car – and that the manufacturer will not cover him at all even when he wanted to buy a brand new car
‘Sorry, we are currently unable to provide you with a quote for your Land Rover’: The page Mr Perring saw after trying to insure his Range Rover through the firm’s own insurance
Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Perring said: ‘I tell them it doesn’t belong to me anymore, it’s been taken by the British Car Auction to Blackhorse.
‘Then the police called me and said they had managed to catch one of the two people who’ve stolen the car.
‘You could not make this up.’
Mr Perring said police told him the car had been stolen from somewhere near Ilford and recovered somewhere in the E11 postcode of London. He was told officers arrested the driver but the passenger got away.
He said he believed the car’s security systems had alerted Jaguar Land Rover and the police that it had been stolen.
Before handing the car back, Mr Perring had removed the aftermarket Tek-Troniks immobiliser he had bought and installed to improve the car’s security, which he describes as ‘hopeless’.
‘These cars are £100,000 it’s f***ing ridiculous,’ he said. ‘It’s shambolic.
‘They’re so easy to steal it’s ridiculous. It’s not worth buying them.
‘I had it for four years on a finance deal and I handed it back because of the insurance.
‘Literally within a day it’s stolen after taking this immobiliser off. It’s farcical.’
Range Rover has said it has invested £10million to upgrade the security of more than 75,000 older cars.
Mr Perring’s car had not been upgraded as he only received the letter offering it a week or two ago and he had already decided to get rid of by that point anyway.
It comes after it was reported last year that Range Rovers are suffering large price drops as their owners struggle to get them insured.
Data from the DVLA in May revealed the Range Rover Velar R-Dyn was the most sought out car by criminals, with two in every 100 of the model stolen.
Land Rover was dubbed the most stolen brand, with 924 stolen per 100,000 in the 12 months to March 2023. It also made up six of the top ten most stolen car models overall.
However, the number of all Range Rover variants (including Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Velar and Evoque) stolen in 2023 declined by almost 20 per cent compared to 2022, more recent DVLA data on vehicle thefts show. It suggests recent efforts and investments by JLR to bolster the anti-theft systems in its cars is having an impact.
JLR says figures from the Police National Computer Data also show a similar downward trend of thefts of Range Rover vehicles, with a 26 per cent reduction between November 2022 and the same month last year.
Range Rovers are much loved by the wealthy and celebrities including footballers (file image)
Range Rover sports utility vehicles (SUV) in the paint shop at the manufacturing plant in Solihull last year
Another Range Rover on the production line at Tata Motors Ltd’s Jaguar Land Rover vehicle manufacturing plant
A spokesperson from JLR said: ‘Although we can not comment on this case due to the ongoing police investigation, JLR will assist the police to look into this claim.
‘For all new, and with our previous generation Range Rover and Range Rover Sport from 2018 Model Year, (as the vehicle in this case), if vehicles are properly locked, and are up to date with the latest security updates, they will be immune to both the relay attack and BCM theft method.
‘We urge all clients who have been contacted by JLR to receive complimentary security upgrades to take us up on these. They can be arranged via authorised retailers and only take around 20 minutes or our specialist roadside assistance teams can come to them for added convenience. Over 80,000 clients have now received these and we will continue to roll these out as part of nationwide programme and wider £15 million investment into vehicle security.’
Mr Perring is just one in a string of fuming Range Rover and Land Rover customers who have found insuring their cars at a reasonable price impossible.
MailOnline reported this week that Range Rover Velar owner Kirsten Lijeskic, 38, said she has had to declare her car off road and will be forced to sell it at a loss of about £15,000 after insurers quoted her £890 a month.
She said she got the £56,000 wheels in September 2022 and had been paying £130 a month insurance for her and her husband with Acorn.
But Kirsten, who lives in Winchmore Hill, north London, said that Acorn will not renew their insurance with them and the car’s own manufacturer also allegedly told her it ‘cannot provide a quote’.
And stay-at-home-mother Hannah Platts, 40, also revealed in late January that her and her husband they were forced to sell their nearly brand new top-of-the-range Land Rover Defender at a £14,000 loss after an insurance company would not renew her policy just one month after buying the car.
Kirsten Lijeskic, 38, has had to declare her car off road after the insurance ran out on Sunday
The cost to insure a used Range Rover more than doubled to £3,270 in the year to October in a period that saw overall car insurance rise 57 per cent, according to Confused.com.
The average quote last year for a man aged 36 to 50 years old driving a newer Range Rover model was £5,186. One driver received a cheapest quote of £48,000 for a car worth £45,000 which was valued at £103,000 two years ago, reported Bloomberg.
The scale of Range Rover thefts has become such an issue in recent years that some owners, particularly those in London, have faced excessive increases in their motor insurance premiums.
In fact, some insurers have refused to cover the cars in the capital over concerns about the high risk of crime.
JLR was forced in October to launch its own insurance cover for customers, which provided an ‘average monthly premium of less than £200’.
Some 8,000 Range Rover owners are currently using this solution, though there are cases where drivers have been rejected by the company’s own insurance package.
There were also fears a shortage of replacement car parts was fuelling car crime, according to reports in November.
Stolen cars can be dismantled in ‘chop shops’ for their parts to be resold, Autocar said.
But Range Rover owners will now be hoping the reported decline in thefts of these motors will have an impact on their insurance premiums.
Criminals usually go in pairs to steal keyless cars. One holds a transmitter and stands next to the vehicle while the other stands close to the house holding an amplifier
JLR boss Adrian Mardell angrily asserted yesterday that Range Rovers are not ‘Britain’s most stolen vehicle’ after announcing the firm’s financial results yesterday.
He said the thefts had fallen by 27 per cent last year compared to 2022 and that new models were especially secure.
He said that only 11 out of 12,800 of the most recent model had been stolen, according to police data.
‘There is no reason whatsoever why any insurance company should not gladly and readily insure those new vehicles. Zero reason, in any part of the country,’ he said.
‘The insurance industry clearly are not using the information and the data… they are very slow to respond to data,’ he added.
Patrick McGillycuddy, JLR UK managing director, previously told This Is Money: ‘The rapid decline in Range Rover thefts in the last year, demonstrates the strength of our latest vehicle security measures.
‘These significant reductions are a result of engineering our new vehicles to be robust against all known theft methods through the latest anti-theft technology, endorsed by third party experts like Thatcham.
‘In fact, our latest data shows that only ten out of 12,200 of the latest model of Range Rovers have been stolen since January 2022.
‘We have also invested £10million to update more than 75,000 older client vehicles with the latest security features and we will continue to roll out the latest updates to tens of thousands more nationwide.
‘JLR is also funding hundreds of thousands of pounds on additional policing to tackle the root causes – by stopping the flow of stolen cars in and out the country, to benefit all UK drivers.’
