Driveway, street or station car park — where Bedford cars are most at risk

Most people in Bedford assume the driveway is the safe option and the station car park is the dangerous one. It is not that simple. All three of the usual ways to leave a car in Bedford carry a different kind of exposure, and knowing which one is yours changes what is worth doing about it.

A driveway is the closest a car ever gets to your keys, and that is precisely the problem with it. A relay attack needs to bridge the distance between the fob and the vehicle, and a car parked six feet from the front door makes that distance trivial. On the newer estates at Wixams and around Shortstown the layout does the offender's work for him — car on the drive, front door behind it, keys on a hook just inside. The compensating factor is that a driveway is overlooked and a stranger standing on one has to explain himself. That helps at six in the evening. At three in the morning it helps considerably less.

A car left on the street is further from the keys, which sounds better and often is not. The distance a relay can bridge is greater than people expect, and a terraced street gives an offender something a driveway does not: anonymity. Somebody standing at a gate on Castle Road or in Queens Park looking at a phone is invisible, because that is what people do. There is nobody whose car it might be, no household who would notice, and no reason for anyone to look twice. A car alarm on a residential street at three in the morning is background noise — nobody comes out, and everybody assumes it is a false trigger.

The station car park is the one with the distinctive risk, and it is not really about security at all. It is about time. Leave a car for the 8am Thameslink and it sits in the same bay until half past six. Nobody who parks there is going to walk past at lunchtime. That gives an offender something no residential street offers: the certainty that a vehicle identified in the morning can be assessed, returned to and taken hours later with no possibility of the owner appearing mid-way through. The overflow rows and the quieter levels of the multi-storey are the natural candidates, with a straight run out to the A421 or the A6 in a couple of minutes.

Workplace car parks work the same way for the same reason, and the retail parks around the edge of town sit somewhere in between — busy, so less attractive for a long job, but full of vehicles whose owners are reliably indoors for at least half an hour.

What is worth noticing is that the standard advice changes with each of these and the actual fix does not. Park in the light, park where you are overlooked, keep the fob in a pouch, do not leave anything on the seats — all sensible, all worth doing, and none of it touches the method. Relay theft does not need darkness, does not need cover, does not care whether the car is under a camera, and takes under a minute.

The one thing that works identically on a driveway in Biddenham, a terrace in the town centre and level three of the station multi-storey is a car that will not start. An immobiliser on the vehicle's own data network asks for a sequence the thief has no way to obtain, and the answer is the same in all three places: the doors open, the engine turns over, and nothing happens.

If you want to know what suits where your car actually sits during the day, send us the registration and tell us where it lives. We fit on your own drive across Bedford, Kempston, Elstow and Wixams, and there is no call-out charge for coming to look.