But I only left it a few minutes.
A victim of a spate of car thefts amid freezing cold weather says he only left his vehicle running unattended to de-ice for a matter of minutes while he bid goodbye to his wife.
As Miles Key was leaving for work, he spotted overnight frost had frozen the windows of his Peugeot 3008 which was parked on the driveway of his cottage on the outskirts of Tedburn St Mary, Devon.
He said he popped outside to turn the engine on for no more than five minutes as he said goodbye to his wife Louise. But as he walked through his kitchen he saw the back of his car disappearing as it was stolen by opportunists.
Miles’s £8,000 company car was one of four vehicles stolen on Tuesday morning after owners left them unattended with the engines running in an attempt to de-ice them.
You never leave your vehicle unattended with the keys in the ignition. If you do and it gets nicked, your insurance company will bid you hard luck.
I think the insurance would have a good case for not paying out after an admission of such intergalactic stupidity!
Oh, I think that very likely.
If they do though, got a sinking feeling that the moron could sue them for some sort of “distress”
It’s always puzzled me why people protest that “I was only away for two minutes”, when the crime took 15 seconds to execute. Something wrong with their brain power there.
Get a plastic bag, preferably one that zip-locks. Fill it with hot water. Seal zip-lock if applicable. Drag plastic bag over car windows, ice on car windows will melt. (If particularly cold, wipe water off windows else it might re-freeze.)
Better than leaving the car unattended with the key in it like the pillock above; better for your windows than a bucket of boiling water; and probably better for the environment than a can of anti-freeze (though I confess this latter consideration really doesn’t bother me much).
I’m always wary of using anything hot on my windscreen in case it cracks the glass. I run the engine while I go around all of the car’s windows with a scraper. By the time I’ve gone round it and selected a Spotify playlist it has started to warm up. The screen has a heating element where the wipers rest which is useful.
What a sad indictment on society that people think this fella is a moron for trying to go to work, to pay taxes, which pay the undoubted benefit packages the feral scum who stole this guy’s car are on.
Yeah, ok, naive to think we live in a world without moronic thieves, but it is they that are the morons here.
He is a fool. Leaving your car running unattended is asking for it to get nicked. We know that these scum are about, so taking reasonable precautions to prevent them from taking our property is just common sense. My bikes have locks and trackers fitted. I had two stolen , despite taking reasonable precautions. My insurers expect me to do what I can to minimise my risk. If I left one outside with the engine running and some scrote rode off on it, they would refuse to pay up and rightly so.
Insurance companies are thieves as well.
I wouldn’t argue with that.
It depends where you are. It’s a fairly low crime neighbourhood around here and I’ve been known to do that myself. On the other hand there are places only a mile or two away where I would not leave anything at all visible, in a locked and alarmed car – one time they smashed a window to steal a cheap coat out of the back.
Of course some thieves take advantage of this and travel.
I used to drive recovery vehicles many years ago. You could push a button that allowed you to remove the key from the ignition and the engine would continue to run. If you tried to drive it off without the key though, the engine would cut out when the handbrake was disengaged.
I’ve tried to recreate it on a car in the past, but got nowhere. I found you could buy the system off the shelf, but it cost more than what I would normally spend on a car (Few hundred quid)