Tracker or immobiliser — which should you fit first in Northampton?

These get discussed as if they were competing products, which is how Northampton drivers end up with the wrong one. They answer different questions. An immobiliser is about the car not being taken. A tracker is about what happens once it has been. Deciding between them is really a question about which of those two outcomes you are trying to buy.

An immobiliser sits on the car's own data network and refuses to let the engine fire until a sequence you chose is entered on buttons already in the cabin. It works before anything has happened. The thief with your relayed key gets the doors open, presses the button, and sits in a car that turns over and will not start — usually on your driveway, usually with no idea why, and usually not for very long before deciding it is not worth it. Nothing has been lost and there is nothing to claim for.

A tracker does not prevent any of that. It tells you and, on a monitored system, a control room where the vehicle has gone. That is genuinely valuable, and there is one scenario where it is the only thing that helps: a car lifted onto a flatbed and driven away without the engine ever being started. An immobiliser has nothing to say about that, because nobody asked the engine to do anything.

The honest case for the immobiliser going first is that recovery is a much worse outcome than prevention, even when it works. A recovered vehicle has usually been somewhere for days, has often been damaged, and comes back through an insurance process you did not want to be in. A vehicle that never left has cost you nothing, not even a phone call. And on the numbers, relay attacks and OBD key programming account for the overwhelming majority of how modern cars actually go, and both are stopped by a sequence the thief cannot obtain.

There is also a practical difference people do not weigh until later. A monitored tracker is a subscription, and it is only as good as the subscription being current — a lapsed one is a box in a car doing nothing. An immobiliser has no ongoing cost at all. Over five years that gap is not small, and it is the reason we fit neither product on a monthly plan here.

So the order we would suggest is straightforward. Fit the immobiliser first, on almost any vehicle. Add a tracker on top if the car is valuable enough that you also want recovery cover, if it lives somewhere a transporter could get to it unobserved, or — the one that settles it — if your insurer's endorsements require a Thatcham-approved tracking system and name a category. If a policy specifies one, that is not a preference and no immobiliser will satisfy it.

What would be a mistake is fitting a tracker instead of an immobiliser because it feels like the more sophisticated purchase. An app that shows you a moving dot at four in the morning is not protection; it is a notification about something that has already gone wrong. Ask anybody who has watched one.

We fit immobilisers rather than trackers here, so take that for what it is worth — but the advice does not change if you buy the tracker somewhere else. Send us the registration, and if your insurer's wording is what is driving the question, send us that line too. We will tell you what actually satisfies it, including when the answer is that you do not need us.