Land Rovers were being stolen at three times the rate of any other model, with one owner quoted a £48,000 annual insurance premium for a car worth £45,000. Three in four thefts go unsolved.
The company has worked hard on fixes, with new models more secure and hopes that premiums now coming down. But the scale of attacks has forced the industry to cooperate more closely.
Shoving the latest high tech gadgetry into a car doesn’t always help. Mercedes thought it had found the answer to theft by putting fingerprint sensors on vehicles’ control panels. Until one day a Malaysian accountant found that thieves had not only robbed him of his S class Merc, but of his index finger, too. Wisely, manufacturers have not returned to this method.
Today, automotive supply chains are very long, very deep, and fiendishly complex. A decade ago, academics calculated that Ford used 1,400 companies across 4,400 locations in its Tier 1 suppliers alone.
There are more in Tier 2 – and that’s two out of ten tiers of suppliers. Nor is it easy to define what a car company actually does in 2024 – it’s like trying to capture fog with a fishing net.
Strip it down to the basics, and the core business involves maintaining the brand, marketing, after-sales support and the final integration. And maybe some manufacturing, but often not.
So much has been outsourced, sceptics say there’s more financial engineering here than there is real engineering.
Car companies use shared car “platforms”, with the same underlying technology badged up differently. For example, Volkswagen’s MQB platform pops up under the Skoda, Audi, and SEAT badges.
China’s Geely is a sprawl of fully-owned IP, investments and joint ventures, spanning Volvo, Polestar, and Aston Martin amongst several others.
And can we say with any confidence where a vehicle has originated? At the highest level, Jaguar Land Rover Group (JLR) is Indian, while Geely is Chinese, and emphatically so.
But as sanctions are imposed on cheap electric vehicles (EVs), the country of origin is turning out to be quite malleable: China is confident that EVs “finished” in the European Union will evade EU tariffs expected to be imposed this week.