How To Prevent Car Battery Theft

On Christmas Day in 2010, I was a victim of car battery theft in Ipoh. It happened at night at the covered car park of a popular hypermarket. I remember that the complex experienced an electricity blackout for about 5 minutes, or maybe less. I thought nothing of it until I went to collect my car and found that my battery was stolen!

One month later, a car battery thief jumped over our fence at home and stole the battery of our other car. Right inside our compound!

We lodged police reports, not expecting our car batteries to be found, but to alert the police of a new trend in thieving and to give them an indication of the hot spots.

Fast forward to 2012, it looks like the whole of Ipoh IS a hot spot. I have friends who sent me text messages advising me to be careful where I park my car, because I am all over town, most of the time at night. And unfortunately, I have numerous friends who are themselves victims of car battery thefts, car break-ins and even car thefts.

A friend got her car battery stolen TWICE within a month! Yes, car battery theft is so rampant that even my car battery seller got his shop broken into. Naturally, he lost all his battery stocks!

After experiencing car battery theft two times myself, I went to a welder to make a bracket to lock my battery, as shown in this photo above. Yes, this reminds me of Mr. Bean but it’s not by choice. Seeing how rampant car battery theft is now, I have advised my friends to get this done as well, and today, decided to share this solution on my blog so that more people could prevent the battery of their cars from being stolen. It’s inexpensive – only cost me RM35 per car in late January, 2011.

Of course, you would still have to buy a padlock to keep the bracket secured. Keep the key separately.

While we may not be able to stop thieves from stealing the tyres (wheels) of our vehicle, other preventive measures that I take are locking my car with the steering lock each time I park and not labelling my car keys with my car registration number. A friend got his keys snatched one day, but the thief could not steal his car due to inability to match the key with the correct vehicle.

One thing that we could do to help one another is to snap a photo of thieves in the act of stealing and to forward the photo to the police.

Stay safe!

Note: View larger images by clicking on an image once this page has completely loaded. Then navigate by clicking on the right or left side of image.