Alarms, steering locks and what they actually stop in Leighton Buzzard

There is a useful distinction that gets lost whenever people talk about car security in Leighton Buzzard, and almost every bad purchase comes from missing it. Some products deter — they make somebody decide your car is not worth the bother. Others prevent — they make the car impossible to drive whether anybody was deterred or not. They are not interchangeable, and deterrence is the one that has quietly stopped working.

Take the alarm first. An alarm is a request for attention from other people, and it depends entirely on those people responding. Everybody reading this has heard a car alarm going off on a residential street at two in the morning, and nobody reading this has ever gone outside to look. That is not apathy so much as experience: the overwhelming majority of alarms anybody hears are false, and we have all learned to treat the sound as noise. An offender has learned that too, and rather better than you have.

The deeper problem with an alarm on a modern car is that a relay theft never triggers it. Nothing about the event is abnormal from the car's point of view — a valid key has been presented, the doors have been unlocked properly and the ignition has been permitted. There is nothing for the alarm to object to. A louder alarm, a better alarm, an alarm with a pager: same result, because the alarm is not being defeated. It is being left with nothing to report.

A steering lock is a more honest product, because at least it is doing something physical. It is genuinely visible from outside the car, and visibility is its whole value — the argument is that somebody walking down your road picks a different vehicle. On an opportunist that is a real effect and worth having.

Where it stops being useful is the moment the theft is deliberate rather than opportunist. A steering lock is a hardened bar around a steering wheel, and steering wheels are made of a material that can be cut in seconds by somebody who came expecting one. Anybody who has arrived for a specific vehicle has factored it in before they got out of the car. It also has the same reliability problem as a signal pouch: it protects the car only on the nights somebody could be bothered to fit it, which is not all of them.

The same applies to the rest of the visible category. Wheel clamps, pedal boxes, window etching, a sticker claiming the car is tracked. Every one of them works on the person who was going to give up easily. None of them works on the person who was not, and none of them addresses either of the two methods actually used on modern cars — the relayed key, and the fresh key programmed through the diagnostic socket in the footwell.

Prevention is a different proposition, because it does not care what anybody decides. A Ghost II or a CAN Phantom sits on the vehicle's own data network and refuses to let the engine fire until a sequence you chose is entered on buttons already in the cabin. There is nothing on show, so nobody is deterred and nobody needs to be. Somebody who has already got in and already beaten the keyless system sits in a car that turns over and will not start, with nothing visible to remove and nothing on a diagnostic tool to explain it. In practice most give up quickly, because the one thing they cannot do on a driveway is spend time.

None of this is an argument against ever owning a steering lock. If you have one, keep using it — it costs nothing to leave on and it does discourage the casual end. What it should not be is the thing you are relying on, and it should certainly not be the reason a keyless car has nothing else fitted.

If you want to know which of the two systems suits your car, send us the registration. We fit on your own driveway across Leighton Buzzard, Linslade and the LU7 villages, and you get a written price before anything is booked.