Leaving a car for a week — what changes

Living in Luton means a lot of people here leave a car somewhere for days at a time several times a year. That is a different security situation from a car that comes home every evening, and it is worth being precise about why, because the usual explanation — that car parks are less safe than driveways — is not really the point.

The official long-stay car parks are lit, patrolled, covered by cameras and staffed. On most measures they are better protected than any residential street in the town. What they cannot change is the thing that actually creates the exposure, which is time.

A car on a driveway is unattended for perhaps nine hours at a stretch, and anybody working on it is doing so under a deadline they cannot control. A car left for a week is unattended for a hundred and fifty. That is not a slightly worse version of the same problem, it is a different one: it removes all urgency, allows a vehicle to be identified on one day and returned to on another, and means nobody will notice anything wrong until the owner walks back to the bay.

Predictability compounds it. A car in a long-stay bay is a car whose owner is demonstrably not nearby and, in most cases, not in the country. That is a stronger guarantee of absence than an offender gets anywhere else, including from a dark driveway at three in the morning where somebody might still come out.

The other thing a week does is expose the informal alternatives, which is where the real risk usually sits. Plenty of people avoid long-stay charges by leaving the car on a residential street near the airport, at a friend's house, or with one of the cheaper off-site operators. A vehicle sitting for eight days on a road where nobody recognises it is conspicuous in exactly the wrong way — it is obviously not a resident's car and it is obviously not being used.

It is worth noting what does and does not travel with you. Your key goes on holiday. The spare almost certainly does not, and it is sitting in a drawer at home broadcasting as usual — which matters if the car is at home rather than at the airport, and matters a great deal if anybody knows the house is empty too.

The standard advice for a long absence is sensible and mostly cosmetic. Park in a busy row rather than a quiet corner, leave nothing on the seats, photograph the car and the bay, take the parking ticket with you. Worth doing, none of it addresses the method. A relay attack does not need darkness or cover and takes under a minute, and a hundred and fifty unattended hours gives somebody the luxury of choosing which minute.

What does not care how long you are away is a car that will not start. An immobiliser on the vehicle's own data network asks for a sequence that exists only in your head, and it asks for it whether you have been gone nine hours or nine days. The doors will still open and the engine will still crank. Nothing else happens.

Fitting takes two to three hours on your own driveway anywhere across the LU1 to LU4 postcodes, and nothing is cut or drilled. If you have a trip coming up, send us the registration and we will confirm the system and a written price before anything is booked.