Nick Ferrari’s family has been hit by car theft once again after one of his sons had his Audi Q8 stolen by thieves.
The LBC presenter became a high-profile victim of Britain’s vehicle crime epidemic last May when his brand new £60,000 Jeep Wrangler was taken from outside his gated home in London.
He believes criminals may have used a specialised device to override the 4×4’s keyless entry system. They then drove away without leaving a trace of evidence, with police unable to track the car down.
Now one of his sons has also fallen victim to the £1.77billion-a-year scourge, but with a happier outcome.
‘He had an Audi Q8 and that was nicked on Monday, but it had a tracker on and he found it five minutes away from where he parked it,’ he told the Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) Acquisitive Crime Conference 2026.
‘The tracker did its job, but he’s got thousands of pounds worth of repairs because they ripped open the dashboard to find it.’
Nick Ferrari (pictured in January) said one of his sons had now had his own car stolen by thieves
Last year, Mr Ferrari had his brand new £60,000 Jeep stolen from outside his gated home in London
Car theft gangs regularly steal vehicles before leaving them somewhere locally to check if they are fitted with a tracker.
If no one collects them, the cars are typically exported abroad before being sold in black market dealerships. A new Audi Q8 costs upwards of £67,000.
After Mr Ferrari’s had his own car stolen, he praised Scotland Yard as ‘hugely supportive’, with officers working hard to try and recover it.
But he was less impressed with the response of his son’s local force, which he did not name but described as being ‘outside London’.
‘They couldn’t have been more unhelpful,’ he told the conference in London.
The 67-year-old has two sons, Nico and Sebastian, who are both in their late 30s. In a 2012 interview, Mr Ferrari described Nico as a racing driver.
Today, the presenter recalled his own experience of car theft as ‘desperately unsettling’.
‘On my first phone call to police I was so unsettled my voice was shaking,’ he said. ‘The call handler couldn’t have been better – at that time they didn’t know who I was.’
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Mr Ferrari said he was later visited by senior police officers, who told him that his Jeep Wrangler Overland had likely ended up in a container port, such as Felixstowe in Suffolk.
The Daily Mail visited Felixstowe last year to watch police break open shipping containers in search for stolen cars.
Gangs steal vehicles to order off streets and driveways – typically by overriding keyless entry systems.
They are frequently ripped apart at black market yards, known as ‘chop shops’, before the parts are shipped to the Middle East or Africa – where they are in high demand due to shortages dating back to Covid.
Most are hidden inside shipping containers that are loaded onto ships. The vast scale of cargo exports means there is a strong chance they will pass through undetected.
Last year, RUSI published a report that documented the international nature of Britain’s car theft crisis.
It found stolen cars are often broken into parts that end up in second-hand dealerships or scrapyards in Cyprus, the UAE and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they are sold into other Middle Eastern and North African countries.
The illegal trade has driven an 82 per cent increase in car insurance premium quotes since 2021, according to the study, Organised Vehicle Theft in the UK: Trends and Challenges.
The think-tank contrasted the professionalism of gangs overseeing this ‘comprehensive logistical process’ with the weak official response – which has seen charging rates drop to just 2.6 per cent in 2023/2024.
However, police forces insist they are suffering from a severe shortage of resources.
The Met Police once had nearly 100 vehicle crime investigators, but it now has only a ‘handful’.
Addressing the RUSI conference, security minister Dan Jarvis said the Government was strengthening its response by creative new offences to tackle the electronic devices used to steal vehicles and increasing funding for enforcement.
He also claimed the creation of the National Police Service (NPS), a new nationwide force that will act as ‘Britain’s FBI’, would help tackle gangs operating across different regions.
