# The car thieves who never touch your key

Police in England and Wales recorded 119,365 thefts or unauthorised takings of vehicles in the year to March 2026: one every 4 minutes 24 seconds, on average. Fewer than three in every hundred vehicle crimes have ended with anyone charged. In the latest survey of victims, almost half of thefts involved a thief hijacking the radio signal of a car's remote key, up from one in eight in 2018–19. The trick works while the key sits inside the house.

*mariuscomper.uk · 14 October 2026*

## How does a keyless car theft work?

Slow one down, from the minutes between thefts to the billionths of a second in which the trick happens.

**4 min 24 s**
Police in England and Wales recorded 119,365 thefts and unauthorised takings of vehicles in the year to March 2026. Spread evenly, that is one every 4 minutes 24 seconds, or about 327 a day.

**35 seconds**
That is how long thieves needed to take Rose-Marie Clarke's BMW from outside her home in March, the BBC reported this week. They used an antenna to amplify the signal from the key fob inside her house.

**The call**
A keyless car does not wait for a button. Every so often, or when someone pulls the door handle, it sends out short, low-frequency beacons that a key can hear only within a metre or two. If a key answers with the right reply, a pull on the door handle opens the car and a press of the start button starts it.

**The relay**
One thief holds a device near the car that catches its call and sends it, by cable or radio, to an accomplice at the front door, who replays it into the house. In 2011 three researchers at ETH Zurich built such relays from parts costing 100 to 1,000 dollars and used them on ten keyless systems, nine fitted to cars from eight manufacturers and one bought as an add-on kit, at distances of up to 50 metres.

**The answer**
The key on the hall table hears what sounds like its own car, close by, and replies. Its answer goes out on a separate radio channel with a range of 10 to 100 metres, enough to reach the car on its own. The cryptography is not broken: the car receives the right answer from the right key, and unlocks.

**35 microseconds**
A relay makes the answer arrive a little late, so why does the car not notice? The Zurich team measured how much delay nine of the systems would accept. The most patient took answers 10 to 20 thousandths of a second late. The strictest allowed 35 millionths of a second, still enough slack, by the researchers' calculation, for a relay about 10 kilometres long.

**Nanoseconds**
Their 30-metre radio relay added about 120 billionths of a second. Radio travels at the speed of light, 30 centimetres in a nanosecond, so a key 10 metres from the car cannot answer in less than about 67 nanoseconds there and back.

A car that timed its key that finely could tell the hall table from the kerb. Ultra-wideband keys do exactly this: they measure the flight time, and a relay can only make it longer.

**1 ns = 1 s**
Stretch a nanosecond to a second, and the 35 seconds it took to steal Rose-Marie Clarke's car would last about 1,100 years.

## Why did car theft come back?

Britain has beaten car theft before. The Crime Survey for England and Wales, which asks households about crimes whether or not they reported them, put thefts of their vehicles at 550,000 in 1993. By the year to March 2026 the estimate was 70,000, 87% lower.

Engineering did much of that work. An EU directive of 1995 required immobilisers, which stop an engine starting without the right key, on new cars; from October 1998 member states, Britain then among them, could refuse to register new cars without one. In the Netherlands Jan van Ours and Ben Vollaard estimated that the device cut car theft by about 40%. In Britain Graham Farrell, Andromachi Tseloni and Nick Tilley found that cars with central locking and an electronic immobiliser, often with an alarm too, were up to 25 times less likely to be stolen than cars without security.

*Thefts of vehicles, England and Wales, thousands. Crime Survey estimates cover households' vehicles only; there are none for April 2020 to March 2022, when the survey was not run face to face. Police figures cover every theft or unauthorised taking they recorded, including of business vehicles, and start in 2002–03 in this series. Source: Office for National Statistics, Crime in England and Wales, year ending March 2026, Tables A1a and A5a.*

Police-recorded thefts fell from 318,562 in the year to March 2003 to 75,312 in 2013–14, then rose to 134,938 in 2022–23. Last year's 119,365 was 5% fewer than the year before, but 46% more than a decade earlier.

Over the same years thieves learned to work on keys that talk. In the Crime Survey, the share of vehicle thefts in which the thief "manipulated signal from remote locking device" went from 13% in 2018–19 to 47% in the year to March 2025. Each year's estimate rests on only about 50 thefts described by victims, so the exact share is loose. Thatcham Research, which rates the security of new cars, told the BBC that thieves can build tools to steal a new model "within months" of its launch.

## How many car thieves are caught?

Very few. Of every 100 vehicle crimes police in England and Wales recorded in the year to March 2026, counting thefts of and from vehicles and tampering with them, 3 had ended with someone charged or summonsed when the figures were compiled. 83 were closed with no suspect identified.

- Charged or summonsed: 3
- No suspect identified: 83
- Other outcomes, including evidential difficulties and cases still open: 14

*Outcomes of vehicle offences recorded April 2025 to March 2026, rounded to whole numbers per 100. Source: Home Office, Crime outcomes in England and Wales 2025 to 2026, Table 1.2.*

Officers told the BBC they are overstretched and that stolen cars are often moved across the country or broken up for parts within hours. Fifteen of the 32 forces in England and Wales that answered a BBC request said they employ no full-time, specially trained stolen-vehicle examiners.

## How do you stop a relay attack?

A relay theft is a chain of four links. Break any one and the car stays put. Pick a defence to see which link it cuts.

- 1The car calls for its key, a metre or two around it
- 2A relay carries the call to the house
- 3The key answers
- 4The car accepts the answer without timing it

Carmakers began fitting sleeping fobs years ago: by November 2019 Thatcham had assessed 24 new cars, 23 of them keyless, and given nine its lowest grade, "Poor", for failing its relay test. Ultra-wideband radio measures distance by time of flight, a practical form of the timing defence the Zurich researchers proposed in 2011. The BBC reported this week that the offence of possessing such devices had applied since April. The statute book disagrees: as of 14 October, section 149 of the act is listed as prospective, meaning it has not yet been brought into force.

Car theft fell by seven-eighths after cars learned to recognise their own keys. The relay trick works on cars that still cannot tell how far away those keys are.

## Sources and method

Vehicle theft counts are police-recorded offences of "theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle", aggravated vehicle taking and causing death by aggravated vehicle taking (offence codes 48, 37.2 and 37.1) for England and Wales; the gap between thefts divides the minutes in the year to March 2026 by that total. Crime Survey figures are household estimates with sampling error. Outcome shares are for vehicle offences as a group, not thefts of vehicles alone. The time comparisons are our own arithmetic from the figures cited. Scotland and Northern Ireland are not included.

- [Crime in England and Wales: appendix tables, year ending March 2026](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables), Office for National Statistics, Tables A1a and A5a
- [Nature of crime: vehicle-related theft, year ending March 2025](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/natureofcrimevehiclerelatedtheft), Office for National Statistics, Table 3b
- [Crime outcomes in England and Wales 2025 to 2026](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/crime-outcomes-in-england-and-wales-2025-to-2026), Home Office, 23 July 2026, Table 1.2
- [One stolen every four minutes: inside the police battle against vehicle thieves](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqpvgyz30zepo), BBC News, 14 October 2026
- [Relay attacks on passive keyless entry and start systems in modern cars](https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/franc.pdf), Aurélien Francillon, Boris Danev and Srdjan Čapkun, NDSS 2011
- [How UWB works](https://www.firaconsortium.org/discover/how-uwb-works), FiRa Consortium
- [Carmakers introduce sleeping fobs to frustrate keyless thieves](https://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/thatcham-research/pressreleases/latest-consumer-security-rating-issued-carmakers-introduce-sleeping-fobs-to-frustrate-keyless-thieves-2939986), Thatcham Research, 6 November 2019
- [Crime and Policing Act 2026, section 149](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2026/20/section/149), legislation.gov.uk, consulted 14 October 2026
- [Commission Directive 95/56/EC](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudr/1995/56/pdfs/eudr_19950056_adopted_en.pdf) on devices to prevent unauthorised use of motor vehicles, 8 November 1995
- [The engine immobiliser: a non-starter for car thieves](https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/the-engine-immobiliser-a-non-starter-for-car-thieves), Jan van Ours and Ben Vollaard, *Economic Journal* 126 (2016)
- [The effectiveness of vehicle security devices and their role in the crime drop](https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895810392190), Graham Farrell, Andromachi Tseloni and Nick Tilley, *Criminology & Criminal Justice* 11 (2011)
- [Speed of light in vacuum](https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?c), NIST
**Defences**

- A key that sleeps: A motion sensor in the fob puts it to sleep once it has been still for a while, so a relayed call goes unanswered. Thatcham found that some fobs sleep after a minute or two, others only after 15 or even 30 minutes.
- An ultra-wideband key: Ultra-wideband radio lets the car time the key's reply to within nanoseconds. A relay can only add delay, so the car sees that the key is too far away and stays locked.
- A law against the devices: The Crime and Policing Act 2026 makes it an offence, punishable by up to five years in prison, to possess, make, adapt, import, supply or offer to supply a device where there is reasonable suspicion it will be used to steal a vehicle, steal from one or take one without consent. It became law on 29 April. On the official legislation record that section is still marked as not yet in force.