Is my car a relay theft target? A two-minute check

Search this question and you will be given a list of models, usually the same dozen premium badges, usually out of date. It is the wrong way to answer it. What decides whether your car can be taken this way is not what is on the bonnet — it is one thing about how it works, and you can establish it yourself in the time it takes to find your shoes.

Go out to the car with the key in your pocket and pull the door handle. If it unlocks without you pressing a button, the car has keyless entry. Get in, leave the key exactly where it is, and press the start button. If the engine runs, the car has keyless start. A vehicle that does both can be taken by relay attack. That is the whole test, and it does not matter whether the car cost eight thousand pounds or eighty.

The reason the model lists mislead is that a relay attack is not an exploit against a particular manufacturer. It copies a conversation between a key and a car, and every keyless car has that conversation because that is what keyless entry is. What the model lists actually track is resale demand — which vehicles are worth the trip. That changes year to year and it does not tell you anything about whether your own car is technically exposed.

Do the same check for the spare, and this is where most households discover a gap. A spare fob broadcasts identically to the one you use. It is usually kept somewhere worse — a kitchen drawer by a back door, a hook in a utility room, a bowl on a shelf in the hall — and it is almost never inside whatever pouch or tin the main key goes in. Half a solution is not a solution when either key will start the car.

If your car failed the test in the other direction and is not keyless, do not assume you are outside all of this. Every vehicle built in the last twenty years has a diagnostic socket in the driver's footwell, and on a great many of them a device plugged into it can be persuaded to program a working key in around a minute. It is a quieter method than the relay and it needs a moment of physical access, but it takes about the same time and it leaves the same amount of damage, which is none.

What genuinely raises exposure across Luton is not the badge, it is predictability. A car that leaves at the same hour, sits in the same place all day and returns to the same spot on the same street is a known quantity. Terraced parking in Bury Park or Farley Hill gives an offender anonymity — somebody standing at a gate looking at a phone is invisible, because that is what everybody does. The newer estates out towards Wigmore put the car, the front door and the keys within a few metres of one another, which is all the relay needs.

If the answer was yes, the options are short and worth being honest about. A signal pouch works and costs almost nothing, but it depends on every adult getting it right every night for years, spare included. A steering lock is a visible deterrent and no more, and neither touches the diagnostic socket at all.

The reliable answer is to make the key insufficient. A Ghost II or a CAN Phantom sits on the car's own data network and will not let the engine fire until a sequence you chose is entered on buttons already in the cabin. Relay the fob all you like — the doors open, the engine turns, and the car goes nowhere. Send us the registration if you would rather we just told you where your car stands; there is no obligation either way.