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Topic: Trying to styeal my Scorpio ... or a Transit? (Read 746 times) |
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DavidBE
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1998 Ghia X 2.9 24V Auto Estate
Posts: 155
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Trying to styeal my Scorpio ... or a Transit?
« on: Apr 25th, 2025, 12:28am » |
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So, last Friday, about 12.30 am, by a sheer fluke of timing a police car on patrol drove up the High Street of the village I live in. They saw a tow-truck, orange lights on the roof, yellow, with red and yellow chevrons on the back, stopped in the street and a couple of guys attaching a tow strap to a parked car. Suspicious, the police stopped, the one,male and one female police officers got out, started to approach, the two men jumped back into the truck, and drove it at full acceleration in reverse into the front of the police car, totally wrecking it (the police car), and sped off up the hill, leaving two shaken but luckily unhurt police officers with their written off police car.
The thing is, the car these scum were attaching a towing strap to was MY SCORPIO (Ghia-X 24V Cosworth Estate). And no, there’s no reason bailiffs or whatever would be repossessing my car!
Now, this is a street, on a hill, with old houses with their walls and front doors directly against the pavement, and most have no garages, so both sides of the hill are lined with parked vehicles, nose to tail by the pavement There are a selection of cars, including assorted BMWs, Audis, the odd Merc, upper range VWs and Volvos, MINIs etc (along with lesser vehicles), almost all a lot younger than my 27 year old Scorpio (and of course the fact it's only done 70000 miles isn't visible without the ignition on). My house is on a corner part way up the hill with a lane off to the left, with only a very small frontage onto the High Street (but which has the front door there). Parking in the first 50m of the lane isn't possible so I'm parked in the High Street, and for various reasons our normal parking pattern is that actually my neighbour, one door down, parks his rather tatty 2010 Skoda Estate nearest the corner, then there's my Scorpio, then his work 2014 Transit with building company logos on the side (he's a carpenter), followed by others from the people living further down (there aren't reserved spaces, so sometimes somebody else sticks a car there so one, two or rarely all three of our vehicles have to be parked further away). Last Friday morning our three vehicles were in place, all parked on the left and facing uphill.
Now ... I'm struggling to believe they were actually after my Scorpio. They weren't popular cars in the day, as we know (although more recently I've had a few guys come up to me in the supermarket car psrk, petrol station, or most recently when I was just stopped at a traffic light in town, looking misty eyed and saying it was so long since they last saw one, and admiring it. But they're not considered collectible classics, most of the ones I've seen advertised have been £3000-5000 for good low-ish mileage examples, and a couple supposedly concours condition about £8000. There's only about 110 on the road according to HowManyLeft. I really can't see a gang coming out with a tow truck especially to take it. Just makes no sense to me. Nor was it the easiest one - that would have been the Skoda in front if it was just opportunistic. If they were going to pull a car out of the line, there were plenty of cars much younger, worth much more, easier to sell, or with a much larger market to sell parts to if they stripped it. I know they were popular for banger racing because they were, for a time, big, strong and heavy, but I wouldn't imagine they'd be so popular now - enough to send out a tow truck with multiple guys risking being caught by the police ... which they nearly were - and actually attack the police with their tow truck.
Cont.
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DavidBE
Full Member
1998 Ghia X 2.9 24V Auto Estate
Posts: 155
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Re: Trying to styeal my Scorpio ... or a Transit?
« Reply #1 on: Apr 25th, 2025, 12:28am » |
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Cont.
I'm thinking that if they'd got as far as pulling the front of my Scorpio out of line there'd have been damage to the steering and suspension (and tyres). My inclination now is that they were actually after my neighbours works Transit behind it, with bonus of tools in the back (there's been a spate of tool thefts from works vans in the nearby city and surrounding villages recently), and they were only putting the strap on my Scorpio to haul it out (which would probably have smashed the nearside of my front bumper into the offside of his Skoda's rear bumper), which would have given them full access to the front of the Transit and get it out without damage. However, the meds I'm stuck on permanently make any thinking slow and difficult, and I often don't see the bleeding obvious. So ... opinions? Would people like that really have been after my Scorpio, or was the (2014 but quite presentable) Transit the likely target?
I'm very worried in case they try again - the chances of a police car arriving just at the right moment are very small, and the odds of it happening again are miniscule. And I'm pretty sure my insurance company would only give me scrap value if it's stolen. As I can't see the car from inside the house I got a cheap wi-fi security camera that's live streaming a view of Skoda, Scorpio and Transit to my previous phone, with the phone mounted on a stand by where I'm sprawled most of the evening and night hoping I'll see a return, but medication side-effects may mean I don't see anything in time. As it currently looks like I'll lose my house in August and have been counting on being able to live in the car, this threat to it now is really upsetting.
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