They stole the wrong BMW!

Redtail Telematics founder Dr Colin Smithers talks about a failed car theft

I was visiting Kate, my son’s girlfriend, and her parents – now wife and in-laws - in Austin, Texas. We were all in a steak house at dinner prior to a concert with veteran Country and Western star Willie Nelson when Kate starting vigorously prodding my arm. “You have to ring home!” she proclaimed. I often keep my phone on silent so my son had texted Kate after failing to raise me. I looked quizzically as it was 6.45pm Austin time so 00:45 at home. “Now! – it's urgent” she maintained.

I rushed outside still chewing a big piece of steak and phoned home. “We’ve been burgled and the BMW is gone” said a forlorn voice at the end of the phone. My wife Helen had come home to a missing car and a house with lots of open doors. “I’ve had the police here and they have asked if it has a tracker in it?”

Tracking a stolen vehicle

I didn’t like to admit that, as CEO of a telematics company that has manufactured and delivered over 6 million devices, I had no formal tracking device in my 4-series BMW. As the feeling of idiocy spread through me, I realised that in fact there was an experimental one in it. ”Yes, I think there is one, but I’m going to have to make a couple of calls, it might take until the morning”.

Being now 1 a.m. UK time I emailed the top team with the news and asked them to search for the device in my car. I didn’t of course know which of the 500,000 we actively track it actually was and expected no response until the morning. However, my mail set off a train of alerts that awoke the senior development manager and he phoned me, now at 01:15 his time while I was at the pre-concert drinks and being exceptionally anti-social to my hosts and their friends. I explained the challenge and asked if he could search for one of the devices knowing no more than location and time, trying to see if it had been on my drive and had then moved. He did find one, but it appeared to have become disconnected. “Sorry Colin, looks like it was found and disabled”.

I spent the whole concert feeling utterly rotten and turning over the thoughts of the burglary and how to track the car. ‘Victim of crime’ suddenly had a new resonance, especially as I knew that Helen was now trying to sleep in a freshly ransacked house; not comfortable at all.

I think I've found it!

I didn’t sleep well and at about 3 a.m. saw a mail from our top AI & ML engineer, Richard, who had only seen the request in the morning when he was fresh and mailed back: “I think I’ve found it!”

I answered “No you can’t have; it was seen to be disconnected”. “Well, that’s odd,” said Richard, “this one left your drive at 19:30 Saturday and drove up the M11 exceeding 130 mph four times and is now parked in Sawston”.

“Oh, that’s different!” I said gleefully and worked out who I might know who lived in Sawston to go and have a look. A senior manager Mark in one of our sister businesses lived pretty close so I texted on his Sunday morning and asked him to walk down the road to see if he could see it. He phoned and said “Ah, I’ve found a white 4-series, except it’s the wrong registration”.

Damn I thought, only slowly realising the plates may have been switched. “Look in the window what do you see? Mark could see a blue phone holder in the middle of the windscreen. “That’s the one!” I exclaimed.

Detailed tracking data!

The police were now involved to do their bit and they removed the car into the secure compound. They asked to see the tracking data which we duly provided. Harlow police said “We’ve never seen such detailed tracking data as this, it’s incredibly useful to assist with our detective work. We can see where the car likely stopped for a few minutes to have the plates swapped and how it took a back route to the motorway junction before proceeding at very high speed through the Saturday evening traffic a couple of junctions before being parked up to cool off”.

The device involved was a prototype next generation device being tested for use by Redtail insurance customers Admiral, ingenie, By Miles (now Direct Line) and also for Stolen Vehicle Recovery applications by Tracker Network in the UK and by LoJack globally.

Using the internal accelerometers and gyro our driver scoring algorithms gave the thief a score of ‘35’, very much bottom of the class. Not a good day out for the crims.