Commuter parking in Leighton Buzzard and the daily window

A great many people in Leighton Buzzard and Linslade drive to the station, get on a train to Euston, and come back eleven hours later. That routine is the reason a lot of people moved here, and it also creates a security situation that is quite different from leaving a car outside the house.

The difference is not that a station car park is dangerous. It is lit, it is busy twice a day, and there are more people through it in a morning than past most driveways in a month. The difference is time, and more importantly, predictable time.

A car on a driveway overnight is unattended, but the person who owns it is thirty feet away and could come out at any moment. That uncertainty is worth a great deal, and it is why most driveway theft happens in a narrow window in the small hours. A car in a commuter bay has no such protection. Nobody who parks there at ten past eight is going to walk past it at lunchtime. Whoever is looking at it knows that, knows roughly when the owner will be back, and can work at a pace that a driveway never allows — assess a vehicle on Tuesday, come back for it on Thursday.

The parts of any commuter car park that matter are the ones with the fewest people and the quickest exit. The far rows, the corners furthest from the platform entrance, the spaces that are convenient at half seven in the morning because nobody else wants them. With the A505, the A4146 and the A5 all within a few minutes, a vehicle taken from Leighton Buzzard is on a fast road almost immediately and out of the area well before anybody has finished a meeting in London.

The method itself is the same one used everywhere else, and it is worth being clear that it does not require the key to be anywhere near. A relay attack copies the conversation between the fob and the car — so if your key is in your coat pocket on a train, the car in the bay cannot be relayed. What it can be is approached with a device on the diagnostic socket, which on a good many vehicles will program a working key in about a minute, in a quiet row, with nobody due back for hours.

Which is why the honest version of the commuter problem is a bit different from the driveway one. On the driveway, your key is the weak point and a pouch genuinely helps. In the station car park, your key is safely with you and it does not help at all, because the attack does not involve your key. It involves making a new one.

The practical things are worth doing and worth not overrating. Park where there is footfall rather than in the convenient far corner. Leave nothing on the seats — not because a bag is worth stealing, but because it is a reason to look inside and then to look further. Photograph where you left it, because at seven in the evening in November everybody's memory of row F is worse than they think.

The thing that does not care how long you are in London is a car that will not start. 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. Program a key through the footwell socket all you like: the doors open, the engine turns over, and the car is still in the bay when you get back.

Fitting takes two to three hours on your own driveway across Leighton Buzzard, Linslade and the LU7 villages, so it costs you a Saturday morning rather than a day off. Send us the registration and we will confirm which system suits the car and what it costs before anything is booked.