The '80s technology that's allowing crooks to drive off in your motor and why it's hard to stop

They're coming for your car – and they don't need your keys.

If you own a Prado or LandCruiser watch out! You hear it and it's not a bang or a smash. Just a soft, deliberate sound at 4am. Probably nothing, you say. The house settles.

Then you glance out the window and watch your Prado or Landy roll down the driveway like it's got somewhere important to be. No broken glass. No yelling. No drama. Just your car calmly leaving.

You go back to bed with the weirdest feeling: you've just been robbed and it looked polite.

By morning, your Prado isn't so much "stolen" as exported – to a shipping container and a new life in Dubai.

Last November, Queensland Police busted a syndicate which stole 60 LandCruisers and Prados from Brisbane driveways in six weeks. Seven men – from Brazil, Fiji, Japan and Afghanistan – allegedly flew in specifically to steal Toyotas, hide them in shipping containers and ship them to the UAE.

One Cleveland, Queensland, family slept through the whole thing: thieves drilled into their 300 Series, programmed a new key and pushed it away in under 60 seconds.

Victoria is worse. Motor vehicle thefts hit 33,000 in the year to June 2025 – up 42 per cent and the highest in two decades. Car keys are now the top target in home burglaries.

Some car-nicking methods have evolved. Some are just good old-fashioned burglary: break in, steal your keys, drive off. New technology like relay attacks amplify your keyless fob signal from inside your house to unlock and start your car outside.

CAN bus injection lets thieves access the car's electronics through the headlights, program a new key and disable factory tracking – all without entering the cabin. Police have seized more than 800 electronic theft devices in Victoria alone.

Now you're asking what is CAN bus?

Why your car is basically an open house

Think of your car as a building with 50 different departments divided between engine, brakes, lights, doors and ignition. In the old days, each department had its own phone line to every other department and was a wiring nightmare. It was nearly a mile of copper spaghetti.

In the 1980s, engineers invented the CAN bus (Controller Area Network). Instead of 50 separate phone lines, everyone shares one party line. The engine talks to the brakes, brakes talk to the doors, doors talk to the ignition and all on the same network. It saves 22kg of wire. Brilliant.

Here's the problem: there's no security on the party line. No passwords. No ID checks. If you can get on the network, every department assumes you're legitimate.

How thieves exploit it

The "CAN injection" attack: The thief pops open your headlight housing (in seconds and no alarm), plugs a $20 device into the exposed CAN connector and sends a message on the party line: "Hey, it's the key fob. Unlock the doors."

The doors unlock. "Start the engine." Engine starts. Thief drives away. The car's systems have no way to know the message didn't come from your actual key.

Why it's hard to fix

The CAN bus was designed in the 1980s when the biggest security threat was a dodgy alternator, not a bloke with a laptop. Retrofitting authentication on to millions of existing vehicles is expensive and complicated.

Some manufacturers are adding intrusion detection with systems that spot unusual messages on the network. But most cars on the road today are still running on trust.

The short version is your car's internal network operates on the honour system and thieves have no honour.

The fixes aren't complicated. A $30 Faraday pouch blocks your key fob signal overnight. An aftermarket Ghost immobiliser ($800-$1500 installed) requires a PIN before the car will start – even if thieves have your keys and have hacked the electronics.

Another EV, another blaze

If you want a case study in "modern cars are safer than ever … right up until they aren't", meet the Volvo EX30. This month Australia's federal vehicle recalls site warns a manufacturing issue means the cell modules in the high-voltage battery may overheat at high charge levels. And if that happens, it could lead to a vehicle fire.

The interim instruction is as blunt as it gets: keep the battery charge below 70 per cent and park as far away from the house as you can.

Owners paid for a 100 per cent car and are being told to live on 70 per cent for an unknown period of time. And because there's no remedy yet, it creates a fresh circle of uncertainty: insurers, strata committees, basement car parks, workplace chargers — all the places where people get jumpy the second you say "battery" and "fire" in the same sentence.

It really Hertz: the final chapter

Regular readers will recall my attempt to test an Audi Q3 in Adelaide through Hertz at full price. Long-time Hertzer Damien Shaw is the big boss there. Sadly, I didn't meet Damien's mysterious "criteria." The taxi to the hotel was very comfortable.

Reader mail has poured in since, with EV charge traps, automated "damage" claims, toll fees like a second mortgage, bonds in limbo, customer service staffed by a tumbleweed.

Perth's Peter F is typical. A gold member, he hired two vehicles over Christmas – $2700 is good business for Hertz. The killer punch? A text on December 29 threatening legal action for "non-return" of a Prado his daughter returned early, freshly washed, two days earlier. The excuse is it was "computer generated". No apology. "As a gold member," Peter wrote, "I can only imagine how the lesser lights get treated."

Another reader documented four complaint channels in online form, email to the head office and industry body. Replies: zero.

Reader Bob writes: "Hertz Melbourne charged me $416 for fuel when the car was clearly returned full. How hard is it to confuse 1/8 with a full tank? The money was returned after two phone calls. Wasn't a big deal, but annoying."

Melbourne reader John writes: "We are on our annual USA road trip and booked a car in Los Angeles. I'm a Presidents Circle member. Arriving at Los Angeles after a 15-hour flight and one hour through Customs, we turn up at Hertz airport to be told 'you'll need to queue there to wait for your car'. The queue was over 50m long.

"I remarked about the long wait to the service person and she said 'that's nothing, yesterday it was 6 hours'. We waited over an hour and our only choice was a 58,000 miles (not kms) Camry that had more hits than Elvis. How does a company fail this epically when we reserved a car?"

Hertz Australia's official response: "We are focused on providing customers with a fair, transparent and well-supported rental experience underpinned by human review and accessible dispute pathways."