Our car got stolen…
This is definitely not in the plans and has become a major set back for us. We purchased Clifford our Land Rover Defender 3 weeks before someone decided to steal him. We have just finished up our Scotland and England adventure and have come through London for a few nights to stock up. We are staying at a friends house and parked Clifford nearby. When we go to drop some stuff off to get ready to go south we realise he has gone.
We get onto police and search for some CCTV footage. We manage to get our hands on some footage that shows a man walking towards the car and then 7 minutes later him running down the street and someone driving our car away – all in the middle of the night.
This is heartbreaking for us as all of our contents were in the car as we have now only a small overnight bag to our names. The process of working with police is awful. Trying to get someone to help is near impossible and we have no luck in getting anyone assigned to our case. The most the police would do is mark the vehicle as stolen and if the plates get picked up by any London cameras then they will be alerted. We know this would not help – the thieves will have already changed the plates.
Two days later we find our rooftop tent on eBay. We gather that they had to remove the tent to fit the car into a storage container to ship it to another country. The tent is listed as a buy now and the buyer is able to pick it up. For us this is the perfect lead to get any more information on our car. By the time the police wanted to listen to our new details the listing was taken down and the police won’t progress it any further.
Defenders no longer in production are an extremely sort after car and often stolen to order. The cars are stolen by professionals, shipped out pretty quick and often end up in countries like Uganda. Only after losing our car we have discovered the amount of defenders getting stolen from the UK daily and never recovered.
Wrestling with our insurance company and trying to rebuild some of our belongings is a hard task but with summer coming to a close we don’t want to waste any time and so come up with a decision to find a replacement car. It comes down to a 1970’s Kombi or a 2004 Defender.
Wow what a super quick 3 week turn around and we are now back on track, only 10 days late into France from our original dates. We will still need to do some work on this car to get it up to the level we want but we can do that along the way. We have all the basics and so far it is working well for us. We are pretty proud of ourselves for getting back on track it would of been so easy to just pack up and leave back to New Zealand, but we have made it this far there was no point giving up on our dreams. Just a massive set back that we learned from and have super tight security now on our new car.Ready for new adventures
Hi
Sorry to hear about your troubles
We are currently looking for a defender
We want an additional adventure vehicle as we either want to drive or ship it to New Zealand as both our sons are living there so we would leave it there to use when we visit.
Are you driving your defender back to nz?
Hope your troubles are now behind you!
Hi Nigel, Yes we are hoping to drive it back to New Zealand, stopping off in Australia for a few months before bringing it back to NZ. Defenders are perfect to explore New Zeland although they can be very expensive to buy. We found it a lot cheaper to buy in the UK, travel and then ship it home. Look out for NZ Requirements of bringing one into the country as they are super strict with safety and rust. Best of luck!