Car Crime Top 10
This year it looks like the Transit Van is top of the “most stolen” chart yet again, with the Mercedes Sprinter being listed in the top 10 yet again also. So what is it with vans?
With automobiles and vans being hard to nigh on impossible to hot wire these days, and also being quite straightforward to trace, and hard to trade on, stealing cars for parts as an alternative is increasing. If you consider it, a used car’s elements are typically really worth far above what the vehicle is complete. In addition to doing so, they are also a lot less complicated to get rid of. You don’t require the registration doc or any other paperwork to buy and trade elements, and quite a few of them aren’t uniquely identifiable.
Parts that are, like the engine, may have individual figures and such like marked on them, but it’s not like these are apparent once mounted in a vehicle or van, and readable in the same way a registration mark is, so there’s quite a puny chance any individual is likely to spot a nabbed part like an engine.
This increasing trend is also having an effect on insurance coverage procedures. As mentioned earlier, it is quite hard to steal a vehicle or van without access to the keys. In truth, most car thieves now do precisely that. These people rob the keys, and then they rob the car, employing a strategy commonly known as “fishing”. Why? Because these people use a fishing rod…
Most people hold their car keys near the entrance door, which is very reasonable for taking them once you go from the house. Typically they are left on a hook or in a bowl, and this is where the fishing rod comes in. Robbers poke it in an open pane or even the letter box and hook the keys using it, retrieving them without a lot of noise, or having to destroy anything, so these people can even do this while you are in the house. Unfortunately, as well as losing the car, doing so can also cause trouble once it comes to reporting a claim from the insurancer.
The majority of car and van insurance policies will havea clause in them denying any cover if a car is stolen using the keys. This is in essence simply because every single winter, there’s often a couple of people who turn on their automobiles and leave them operating outside with the keys in before leaving for work in the morning, and opportunistic thieves take them. In instances like this, it isn’t possible to genuinely fault an insurer for not looking to pay out for somebody’s blatant stupidity, where the claim was entirely foreseeable and might have been quite very easily avoidedinitially.
There’s one more difficulty too, that affects van insurance policies. Some insurance companies will have suffered fairly a few claims where thieves have observed a van loaded up with items these people want. Rather than breaking in, unloading and re-loading the items, they merely rob the automobile along with the items currently in, and unload at their own place, at their own leisure, with no the anxiety of being caught. Yet again, certain insurance companies will not pay out for a vehicle that is still loaded between the hours of 9pm and 6am, particularly if that payload is tools, or alternatively, the premium can be larger in the initially.
These clauses are now fairly typical and it will pay (sometimes literally in the event of a claim), to be aware of these, to prevent the pointless pain of a declined payout.