AVT
Sentinel™
Stolen Vehicle Tracking System
If you have been intrigued by adverts for trackers before, but discounted them
due to cost, then you might want to take a look at AVT Sentinel™.
The idea behind this stolen vehicle tracker is that you are completely in control of monitoring your car’s location on a moving map on the internet (or on your mobile ‘phone). This means that in the event that your vehicle is stolen, you are not reliant on a call centre which will merely liaise with the police and will not pass your vehicle’s position information back to you. Another advantage of this approach is that you do not have to pay the £100-150 subscription fees (typically) per year for the call centre whether your car is stolen or not.
AVT Sentinel™ has been targeted at individuals with vehicles that are cherished, unique and irreplaceable as opposed to those whose loss can be easily covered with an insurance claim.
For example, if your car does not have a high insurance value, but is rare or much improved and modified, then the chances of replacing it like-for-like with the proceeds of an insurance claim are pretty slim, and what you’d really like is to be able to recover it. There’s also the time, effort and money that you’ve no doubt spent getting it into its current condition, and an insurance payout isn’t necessarily going to help with that. Finally, there is the knowledge that if you do have a claim for theft, there are potentially weeks or months of aggravation getting the payout and then the inevitable increase in insurance premiums in the following years.
So far, the average tracker cost of £400 purchase price plus £120 per year subscription has not seemed like great value, and whilst the insurance companies purport to offer discounts if a tracking device is fitted, the reality is that there is little or no saving to be gained from the competitively-priced companies.
AVT Sentinel™ is a tracking device without any annual contract, priced at £299 (with a £50 discount available via the advert in this magazine). Once purchased, the unit is yours for life and can be moved from vehicle to vehicle as you wish.
AVT Sentinel™ is available for self-fitting by you or your local auto-electrician, or it can be installed for you at your home or office by AVT’s nationwide fitter.
The idea behind the product is actually quite simple. A small box comprising the electronics that make up a GPS (sat nav) receiver and mobile phone is hidden in your car. When activated, this sends your car’s position every 10 seconds to a website where you can see it on a moving map updating in real-time. You can also see the moving map on your mobile phone.
The unit is activated automatically if the car is moved without the keys or if the battery is disconnected. Additionally, you can set an ‘electronic fence’ around the car so the unit is activated even if the car is stolen with the keys as the result of a burglary, or from one of those car parks where you leave your keys. Finally you can start and stop tracking anytime you like, with a simple text message from your mobile phone.
Rather than being alerted by a call centre, you receive a text message directly to your mobile phone if the unit thinks the car is being stolen. Once you’ve confirmed that it is actually a theft (and not your husband/wife forgetting to turn off the electronic fence that you set), you can report it stolen to the police.
Armed with the position of the car, the road it’s on and which way it’s travelling, you are able to communicate your car’s exact whereabouts to the police when you report it stolen. This information allows them to be proactive about the crime, rather than having to simply record it and hope that one of their officers stumbles upon your car in the course of their duties.
Other than the purchase price, the cost of running the unit is really low. The only costs are those associated with the ‘mobile phone’ part of the unit. Inside the AVT Sentinel™ unit is a Vodafone pay-as-you-go SIM card, which is supplied with a Vodafone top-up card and £10 credit. Every 5 days the unit ‘checks in’ with the AVT Sentinel™ data centre to confirm that it is working correctly. This takes 5p from the credit on the unit, and therefore the fixed cost of running the unit is only £3.65 per year. If your car is stolen and texts you, 10p is deducted from the credit for the SMS message and if it is tracking, it’s 30p per hour but capped in the UK at just 50p per day. So in summary, if your car’s not stolen it’s going to cost you £3.65 per year and if it is, you might spend another couple of pounds to locate it!
When the credit drops below £5, you receive a reminder to top up which can be done at any supermarket and most bank machines.
This is definitely the kind of security product that would be of interest to people who regard their car or vehicle as something more than a simple lump of metal that an insurance payout can replace.
You can find out more at www.avtracking.co.uk and readers of the Lincolnshire Centre Winter 2009/2010 Newsletter are being offered a discount code via our advert which will save you £50 if you decide you want to buy one.