Audi RS4 Seats Being Stolen to Order

Quote:Audi RS4 front seats are being stolen to order - with the cars being written off by insurers due to the £19,000 cost of replacing them



Adam McKenzie saw the broken windows as he soon as stepped out of his south London home late in January. His beloved Audi RS4 performance saloon had been broken into. But when he got closer his annoyance turned to outright amazement: working right under his bedroom window, the thieves had managed to unbolt both his front seats and squeeze them out of the smashed window.
"I was just gobsmacked. In a way I was impressed with how it had been done," he says.
But much worse was to come. His insurance company told him that to fix the 2007 car and replace the seats would cost £19,000. Although worth about £26,000, McKenzie's once immaculate, low-mileage car would be written off.



McKenzie wasn't the only one affected. In July 2013, cameraman Chris Smith lost the seats from his RS4 outside his house in Fulham. A week after McKenzie's car was targeted, equity fund manager David Torbet from Clapham woke up to find the roof ripped open on his RS4 convertible and the seats gone. In November last year management consultant Matt Rhodes from Richmond narrowly avoided the same fate when neighbours disturbed a thief about to do the same thing.

Smith said: "I have only met two other people who have the same RS4 and all had seats stolen. That's three out of three." Tales from dealers, forums and aftermarket alarm-installers suggests seats aren't safe in any street-parked RS4, especially in London.

Torbet's car was also a write-off and Smith only managed to get his car repaired with insurance money after he put in strenuous leg-work to get the price of the seats reduced.

So what is it about the RS4's seats that makes them so expensive? The so-called B7 version of Audi's practical supercar was sold between 2006 and 2008 and although the V8-powered machine is still highly desirable and worth upwards of £30,000, Audi doesn't make the seats any more.



So they have to be imported in parts and according to mechanic Daniel Parsons at Five Oaks Audi, who had painstakingly done just that for Smith, it takes in excess of 20 hours at £132 an hour. "It was hard work," he says.

So that accounts for the cost. But who on earth are these seats being stolen for? Audi only sold about 2,000 of the cars in those two years and the race-inspired, leather-skinned bucket seats are hard-wearing enough not to need replacing.

The answer could lie in a new modification fashion, according to one expert. "There's a type of styling trend called OEM-plus where you use original equipment parts but from a superior car like a Bentley, Porsche or Audi," says Elliott Roberts, editor of Performance VW magazine. "You see Audi TT dashboards in Golfs and all sorts of stuff."

This he says is a step up from the old days when the Max Power generation slapped on an aftermarket body styling kit. This is much more sophisticated.

Fitting the parts to cars such as Golfs is fairly easy given how companies like VW encompass so many brands, all sharing parts and platforms. But these parts are not easy to get hold of, and they're not cheap.
"Normally it's a case of going on eBay or to a scrapyard and buying parts from a scrapped car," says Roberts. "Even secondhand they go for £2,500 for two front seats, so you see why there's a black market out there."

High-end seats are the latest parts to be targeted following on from a spate about three years ago when Bentley Continental GT owners were finding their £100k-plus cars sitting on bricks with the wheels missing.

Two things are making life easy for the RS4 seat-theft criminals and hard for the police. The first is the lack of identification on the seats linking them to the original car. Go on to eBay and RS4 seats can be sold with impunity. Audi confirmed to us that they still don't put VIN numbers on or tag the latest RS4 seats, something that energy trader McKenzie is unimpressed with. "It's not going to stop unless they help existing owners," he says, pointing out that identification data tagging on (Audi-owned) Ducati motorcycles has been standard since the late Nineties.



The second problem is the ineffectiveness of the alarm. "The RS4 security system is very poor," says Antony Noto, owner of Bristol-based alarm company Secure My Car. "The siren is very quiet and the sensors can be disabled in seconds." Exactly what happened to both McKenzie and Rhodes (the ripped-out sensors are pictured above).

Noto said he's seen about 30 cases of seat-theft around London in the past year, mostly RS4s but also less rarified models such as the S-line high-spec versions of standard Audis. "An Audi dealership called today about one of our systems. They have three cars in at the moment which have been attacked," he says.

Rhodes has now fitted a serious alarm to his RS4 Avant after almost losing the seats. In his case the police arrived just after the thief cut the seatbelts, but the police couldn't prosecute despite finding him crouching behind a nearby car because the neighbour who spotted the attempt didn't get a good enough look at the perpetrator. "He said he tripped on his shoelaces," recounts Rhodes.

It's looking more promising in McKenzie's case – as we went to press the police called saying they'd matched some blood found on the back seat. But he's gone right off a car that, following its previous starring role in a string of key-theft cases, is well on its way to becoming this generation's Ford Sierra Cosworth as far as attractiveness to thieves goes.
McKenzie says: "I'd love another, but after this I don't think I could face it."