Stolen motorhome

Aug 23, 2019 52 Replies

Depending on the insurance company, vehicle (make and value), the insurers have different requirements.

I'm a bit surprised their insurers didn't expect a Thatcham 1 alarm for the vehicle you describe, even though as motorhomes go it isn't one of the more expensive ones.

Ford based ones seem to have been especially targeted recently- at least one of the insurers sent a circular out regarding changes in conditions. It didn't impact us so I don't recall the details.

I believe that is common practice.

The was a car in a pub car park that I work at the other morning. CCTV showed it been parked up and the driver not going into the pub. Leaving cars in a pub car park overnight is quite common around here (I have no idea how common it is elsewhere) but the landlord usually knows the car's owner.

It was stolen (keys taken from a house burglary)

was it down a dirt track with overhead services and dodgy drainage in kent... ?

because you have an old junky Fiat junk.....

Does make it a bit more obvious that the thief is up to no good and that its not just the owner with a problem getting the van started

And its not hard to design the van with a crook lock thingie that can't be easily cut with a battery angle grinder. Harder to add one to a van which doesn?t have the designed in tho.

What happened with the alarm ? Did it go off and was ignored or did it never go off ?

But a lot more attention is paid if the alarm is howling its head off at the time. And the perps obviously need a lot more hardware than just a battery angle grinder too.

Add a decent tracker that uses the same approach as the iphone find my phone system and there is f*ck all chance of the crims being able to pull it off successfully.

Doesn?t matter what they assume with the tracking.

I wouldn?t use a pin alarm, too each to check for that before taking the van.

Better to have one based on an iphone and use the movement sensors to trigger the alarm and have full tracking of the van, and video footage of the crims in the drivers seat etc. While in theory they could wear a balaclava, its less likely that they would get away with driving off with the alarm blaring while doing that.

nothing is lower quality than a fiat .......

they are now f****ng up chrysler in the states....your new jeep is now made from fiat parts ....

That?s very arguable with frog s*it, yugos and east kraut s*it.

Many years ago, on this very forum, somebody suggested a good DIY project was to knock up a device which exploded when 3 or 4 of it's kind were gathered within a few yards, and fitting them to "Hobby" type touring caravans (if you know what they look like, you'll know why ...).

Rather than piss around with "is it/isn't it" worry over tracking, surely the easiest thing to do is to drive the vehicle into a Faraday cage and thence into a Faraday barn ?

A hi-vis waistcoat and clipboard, especially if you're also smartly dressed, will get you into a surprising number of places if you're brazen enough to try it.

Just imagine how popular you'd be with all the other campers if you came back from the pub to find your alarm had been going off for ages. Much better to use a silent remote alarm and some sort of tracker, but for those to be useful they need to be hard to find and disable - if they were all fitted as standard, standard systems in standard places, then they'd be relatively easy to disable soon after the stolen vehicle had been removed.

I heard a story a few years back of a high end car being stolen, and the tracker showing nothing.

Until it was unloaded from the container in Rotterdam...

Andy

It happened to us on our last trip. We had just got on the park an ride bus in Bath ( we tow a car on a trailer), when the site warden called to say our alarm had been going off for awhile. We explained we were already heading back and would be about 20/30 mins. It was a hot day - the previous hot spell a month or so back- so fortunately a lot of the adjacent campers were also out and about, as we were. I visited those that weren?t and apologised for the noise etc. All were very understanding.

It isn?t uncommon. We were in Delft just after Easter. The people in a motorhome opposite seemed to trigger their alarm every time they opened the door. It was a rented vehicle ( company details on the side) and they didn?t seem to have got used to it.

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