Company cars and fleet vehicles in Northampton — who knows the code?

Securing a vehicle you drive yourself is a straightforward problem. Securing several that other people drive is a different one, and it fails in places a private owner never has to think about. If you run vehicles for a business around Northampton, these are the parts worth getting right before anything is fitted.

Start with the obvious one, which is that a shared secret shared widely is not a secret. If eleven people know the sequence for a pool vehicle, and four of them have left in the last two years, the sequence protects the van from strangers and from nobody else. That is not an argument against fitting one — it is an argument for deciding, in advance, who holds what and what happens when somebody leaves.

The workable pattern for most small fleets is one sequence per vehicle, held by the people who genuinely drive it, and a policy of changing it when a named driver leaves. On a CAN Phantom you can do that from a phone in under a minute, without booking anybody in and without the vehicle coming off the road, which is the reason we usually suggest it for fleet use over the Ghost. On a Ghost II the sequence is changed at the car, which is fine for an allocated vehicle with one regular driver and less convenient for a pool.

Valet mode is the feature that does most of the real work, and it is underused. It lets somebody start and drive the vehicle for a limited window without ever learning the sequence, then lapses on its own. That covers the agency driver, the apprentice, the subcontractor for a fortnight, the technician at the dealership and the valeter — all the people who need to move the vehicle and none of whom should be given a permanent credential. Set it, hand the keys over, and it expires without anybody having to remember to revoke anything.

Then the keys themselves, which is where fleets actually lose vehicles. A key cabinet in an office, a set of spares in a drawer, a fob left with reception. Every one of those is a keyless fob broadcasting continuously a few metres from an external wall, and a cabinet is not a Faraday cage. If your vehicles live in a yard and the keys live in the building beside it, you have built the ideal conditions for a relay attack without anybody deciding to. Sorting that out costs very little and is worth doing whether or not you fit anything else.

Two administrative points that catch people. First, most fleet vehicles are leased or on contract hire, so check the agreement before work is booked. The great majority of funders are entirely relaxed about a non-invasive CAN-bus system and some prefer one, but it is an email rather than an assumption. Because nothing is cut, drilled or spliced, the system unplugs at the end of the agreement and the vehicle goes back with no trace and no deduction. Second, tell your insurer or broker, and get the TASSA certificates onto the fleet policy file rather than into a glovebox. On a fleet policy that documentation is worth more than it is on a private one.

Finally, write it down somewhere that is not a person's memory. Which vehicle has which system, who currently holds each sequence, when it was last changed, and where the certificates are. Fleets lose track of this within about a year otherwise, and a security system nobody can administer quietly becomes a system nobody uses.

We fit at your premises or wherever the vehicles are parked, across Northampton and the surrounding NN postcodes, and we can do several in a visit. Send us the registrations and we will come back with what suits each vehicle and a written price for the lot.