Driveway security: eleven things you can do this week

Almost every vehicle thief is weighing effort against reward. The goal is not to make your car impossible to steal, it is to make it enough trouble that they go elsewhere. Most of what follows costs nothing.

Tonight, for free

1. Move the keys away from the front door. Not the hallway table, not the hook by the door. A relay device works through walls and doors, and every metre of distance helps.

2. Check where your spare key is. It is almost always the forgotten one, sitting in a drawer near the front of the house.

3. Park nose in. It takes longer to reverse a car off a drive than to drive it off forwards, and thieves are working to the clock.

4. Box it in. If there are two cars, put the less valuable one behind the more valuable one. Simple, and surprisingly effective.

5. Turn the wheels. Wheels turned towards the kerb make a vehicle slower to move, particularly on a flatbed.

This week, for very little

6. Buy a Faraday pouch. A few pounds. Buy two, one for the spare. Test it works using the method in our guide, and test it again every couple of months.

7. Get a light on the driveway. A motion sensor floodlight is cheap and genuinely off-putting. Working quietly in the dark is most of the appeal.

8. Use a steering lock. Unfashionable, visible, and it does put people off. A thief scanning a street for the easy option sees it immediately.

9. Check what is on show inside. A bag, a coat, a sat nav mount. A visible reason to break the window is a reason you can remove in thirty seconds.

When you are ready to spend properly

10. Fit a hidden immobiliser. An Autowatch Ghost means the engine will not start without your code, no matter how they got in or whose key they are holding. This is the step that actually stops the car leaving, and there is no subscription.

11. Fit an alarm that tells you. A Pandora system buzzes your phone the second the car is touched, tilted or moved, so you find out while somebody is still on your drive rather than at seven the next morning.

What we would prioritise

If you did nothing else on this list, do 1, 2 and 6. They cost almost nothing and they close the easiest attack available on a modern car.

If you want to stop worrying about it, 10 is the one. Everything else raises the effort a little. An immobiliser changes the answer entirely, and it does not rely on anybody remembering to do anything.

One thing worth saying

None of this makes a vehicle impossible to steal, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. What good security does is make your car slow, awkward and loud to take, which for almost everybody is enough.

We are always happy to tell somebody that their existing arrangements are fine. Send us the make, model and year and where it sits overnight, and we will give you a straight answer.