It took just four seconds for the hooded figure to crouch down in front of the Volkswagen Golf GTI and rip away its front badge before sprinting off into the night.
The badge has the car’s cruise control radar sensor built into it, a part that can be bought for £200 online but can cost as much as £1,500 for the owner to replace. In other types of cars the cost can be as high as £3,500.
The thieves typically target all the vehicles on a few streets in a single night, often without setting off their alarms. VWs, BMWs and Mercedes are all being targeted. Furious motorists say the thefts expose a design flaw that car manufacturers are doing nothing about.
Stratis Alisafakis, from Ealing, west London, captured a thief on video taken by his Ring doorbell on March 24, just after midnight.
The same thief also targeted a VW T-Roc parked 500 metres away on an adjacent street. The T-Roc owner’s doorbell camera registered the theft five minutes after Alisafakis’s was taken. Again, it took four or five seconds.
Alisfakis, 40, said he has not replaced the badge for fear it will just get stolen again. “I did not want to put another one in yet because it can be nicked in four seconds flat,” he said.
The connection for the cruise control radar on Stratis Alisafakis’s VW remains exposed
In Volkswagens the part being stolen doubles as the car’s forward-facing radar sensor for its adaptive cruise control (ACC) unit, which measures the distance to the vehicle in front and adjusts the car’s speed accordingly. It sits right behind the badge; similar units are found in many modern vehicles.
Garages say thieves are selling the ACC parts on the black market and on websites such as eBay and Facebook Marketplace. The Sunday Times found several priced between £70-£230, with cut wiring on full display.
There is nothing to suggest the items being sold in the listings are stolen
However, owners cannot simply buy the part second-hand and fit it themselves. It has to be re-calibrated by VW or a specialist dealer, so the sensor’s parameters are again set with the car to allow it to function accurately.
Volkswagen said the part is “chassis-stamped” and, as long as the theft is reported to the carmaker, it “can then be locked so that it is inoperable on another vehicle, and as a result worthless on the black market”.
When Alisafakis took his Golf GTI to a VW dealership, he was quoted £1,500 to replace it. Baulking at the cost, he has instead bought a “cheapo badge”, minus the radar, and consequently drives around with an orange warning light permanently showing on the dashboard. Although the cruise control no longer works, the car is able to pass its MOT.
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“The guy [at the dealership] told me he sees three to four a week come in asking about this,” Alisafakis said. He submitted his Ring doorbell footage to the local police station but was told it was useless because it did not capture the criminal’s face.
When he emailed Volkswagen, a customer relations manager at its UK headquarters in Milton Keynes told him the company was “unable to provide any goodwill support regarding this issue”.
Badges ripped off VWs, BMWs and Mercedes can cost up to £3,500 to replace
Alisafakis, who has now started an online petition on Change.org to get Volkswagen to take action, said: “They just wash their hands. I am really frustrated. It is rife and it is getting worse.”
He may be right. In East Dulwich in southeast London, there was a spate of similar VW badge thefts earlier this year. One of the victims was Chris Gallery, 43, who sold his Volkswagen Golf after his car was targeted twice in a year. Both times the cost to fix it was about £1,000, which he claimed on his insurance, but has now decided to sell the car.
Gallery compared it to bike theft as “one of these petty things that happen all the time that nobody follows up on”. He added: “We were just like, it’s going to happen again so there’s no point in keeping the car. Every Volkswagen within three blocks of our house had the same thing happen … I reckon they did about ten cars that night.”
His local VW garage suggested that Gallery should glue the badge on after the first theft in January last year. He did — but thieves targeted him for a second time exactly a year later.
Like Alisafakis, he too wrote to Volkswagen to complain and received a similar “generic” response. It said: “Whilst it is unfortunate that you had to endure this, our current insights do not suggest that this is a widespread issue … Despite our empathy for your situation, we must inform you that Volkswagen is currently unable to offer you any goodwill support in this circumstance.”
Gallery swears he will never buy another VW.
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In online forums, Mercedes and BMW owners have also reported being victims of sensor thefts. Jonathan Humphreys, 48, from southwest London, owns a BMW M3 Touring. In this model, the front radar system sits just below the number plate.
He said: “It appears that all someone had to do to make off with it is simply unscrew it, unplug the connectors and pull it off.”
Around a month later his friend, Andrew Perry, 42, who lives less than a mile away and owns the same car, also had his sensor stolen.
Humphreys posted about it on a BMW forum and several other drivers reported the same problem in parts of London including Wandsworth, Fulham, Tooting and Balham. One wrote: “Looks like you were also caught out by the mass theft of BMW radar sensors in SW London that happened on Monday night — welcome to a pretty unhappy club.”
He was quoted £3,546 by an official BMW garage, including VAT, to fix a new sensor, and made an insurance claim to pay for it. He wrote to BMW asking if it had plans to address the issue and described the response as “appalling”.
In an email a customer services worker told him “I can understand how disappointing this must be for you”, and advised him to discuss it with his local BMW centre.
“By making it so expensive to replace, they are actually creating a demand and a market for these radars through unofficial marketplaces,” said Humphreys. “I’ve seen them for sale on eBay, and you have to wonder where they come from. I believe [carmakers] are quite happy for it to continue happening since they clearly make a nice bit of money from the resale of new radars, anti-theft kits and all the fitting and calibration that follows.”
Like Alisafakis, Perry, who lives in Balham, has not bothered replacing the part, worried it will be stolen again. He said: “What blows my mind is that BMW would make it so easy to steal such an expensive component. If you look online you can see that the radar unit can be removed from the car in about 30 seconds.”
He described it as a “real flaw in manufacturing and common sense’, adding: “I will not be buying another BMW with a radar system.”
The Metropolitan Police say there were 23 reports of VW owners having front badge and cruise control radars stolen in two London boroughs — Lambeth and Southwark — in January and February. There have been no arrests.
Mike Orford, head of PR for VW UK, said: “The average replacement rate for the part in question is only a handful per month, per retailer, across the country. There are only one or two retailers where this number is higher, and they are both in London.”
He said VW “do not consider there to be a design flaw” and advises customers to report it to police with the VIN number, a unique code assigned to cars for identification purposes, so that information gets passed on to the company’s headquarters.
“We are always sorry to hear of customers whose experience of our products falls short of expectations, but we maintain that this specific type of theft appears to be a localised criminal issue.”
In the 1980s, rapper Mike D of the Beastie Boys wore a heavy chain necklace with a VW badge hanging from it for the video for (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!). The badge became a fashion accessory and their subsequent theft made headlines at the time, as fans stole them as trophies to emulate the group.
Beastie Boys rapper Mike D caused a spiked in VW badge theft after wearing one as a fashion accessory
ROSS MARINO/GETTY IMAGES
BMW UK said: “BMW Group specialist security teams work continuously to design and enhance the best possible security systems in our vehicles. The challenge of targeted vehicle component theft evolves as organised criminals targeting cars become ever more sophisticated, and BMW works in partnership with police and other authorities in the UK and around the world in responding to the latest threats and anticipating new ones.
“To combat this constantly evolving threat, the company continuously innovates and strengthens the layers of security across our vehicle range, although we do not publicly disclose all of these security measures because maintaining secrecy is crucial to staying ahead of criminals.”
Mercedes-Benz said: “[We] strongly condemn all forms of criminal activity and any unauthorised reuse or secondary use of genuine Mercedes-Benz parts. Our highly complex and safety-critical sensors are permanently integrated into specific components — such as the front bumper — and are precisely positioned, engineered and certified for each vehicle to fulfil their specific function.”