Security – Could the £29 Apple Air Tag be a low-cost security solution for tracking & locating your stolen Figaro?

An Apple Air Tag has been around for about a year and was designed to track all manner of things: people, belongings, pets and even vehicles. So, priced at just £29 with no ongoing subscription cost, could this device also be used to track and locate the whereabouts of your Figaro, if it’s stolen?

Club founder Kevin Fagan bought the AirTag and carried out a test by placing it in the lower boot of their Figaro (named Belle). Kevin’s wife Sue then drove the car into the nearby town of High Wycombe for the weekly shop. The results were simply astounding because, within just 3 minutes of leaving the house, Kevin’s iPhone had located the car. 10 minutes later the phone actually ‘pinged’ with a text message saying “Figaro this item was seen near the cinema” just before the car was parked in the ASDA car park.

So the key question I suspect most owners want to be answered is could an AirTag help track down a stolen Figaro. I’d give that a qualified ‘yes’. But let’s be clear about the Air Tag’s limitations. This is not a great device for live tracking. Don’t think that if you see your car being stolen off the drive, you’ll be able to see a little dot moving across Apple Maps, plotting the car’s ‘live journey’. It’s not a GPS tracker and the updates provided from an AirTag are sporadic.

The iPhone displayed the location of Belle as Sue drove towards High Wycombe. The updates came through every few minutes.

HOW DOES IT WORK
The AirTag works by connecting to nearby iPhones or iPads using ultra-wideband technology? That has a maximum range of about 30ft (9m). The key thing is that the AirTag doesn’t have to lock on to your iPhone to provide a location – it will latch onto any modern iPhone or iPad. If your car thief happens to have an iPhone on them, the updates might be regular. If not, you could be waiting ten minutes, half an hour or even hours between location updates, because it will need someone to pass close by with an iPhone/iPad.

This obviously means that the AirTag is a much better tracker in busy urban environments than it is in rural areas. If your stolen car is dumped down a quiet country lane or in the middle of nowhere, the chances of your AirTag locking onto a nearby iPhone are obviously greatly reduced. That said, the AirTag has managed to accurately locate the parked location of Belle when Sue took it shopping. When she’s parked the Figaro, the location was accurate enough to reveal what part of the open-air car park she was parked in, meaning I’d be confident of finding Belle if it were stolen and dumped with the AirTag inside!

One of the advantages of using an AirTag rather than a GPS system to track a vehicle is that it can still locate cars in underground car parks. And if you’re trying to locate your vehicle in said car park, the ‘Precise Finding’ feature (only available on iPhone 11 or 12 models) might even help you pinpoint the car’s exact location in that car park, although by the time Precise Finding kicks in you’ll probably be able to see the car anyway.

Note from the screenshot that the Find My app provides a precise address for the AirTags location, complete with postcode (or zip code), as well as a time for when it was last located. That information could be vital if you’re trying to convince the police to attend to a stolen vehicle, for instance!

PLACING THE AIR TAG IN THE FIGARO
AirTags are small enough to easily hide in any part of the Figaro. Also, as it lasts for a year, you can hide it and just forget it.

HOW TO BUY
Simply click on the Apple link. Buy here

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