Most of what we fit is designed to stop a theft happening. A CAN-bus immobiliser means a relayed or cloned key starts nothing. A Thatcham S5 or S7 tracker means that if a vehicle does move without authorisation, someone is watching it in real time and the police get a live feed.
But there’s a category of valuable item that neither of those covers. No permanent power supply. Nowhere to hide a conventional unit. Too small, too awkward, or too obviously modified the moment you bolt something to it. And for those, we’ve started fitting something new.
What it actually is
It’s a battery-powered asset tracker, and it is genuinely tiny. Small enough to disappear into places a conventional tracker simply cannot go. It needs no wiring and no power feed, so there’s no install scar, no spliced loom, and no giveaway that anything has been added.
The part that matters most: it doesn’t look like a tracker. Anyone who has been in this trade a while knows that a thief who finds a tracker removes it in seconds. The value here is that even someone stripping an item down and looking carefully is very unlikely to identify what they’re looking at.
Why there’s no photograph on this page
You’ll notice we haven’t shown you one. That’s deliberate, and it’s the same policy we apply to our immobiliser product pages.
The entire value of this device rests on the fact that a thief doesn’t recognise it. Publishing a clear photograph of an unusual-looking object and captioning it “this is a hidden tracker” hands that away to every person who might ever go looking for one. We’re not doing that. If you want to know exactly what it looks like before you buy, pick up the phone and we’ll describe it to you properly.
Two years of battery, and it doesn’t start counting until you say so
The unit runs for around two years on a single internal battery. In practice we’ve seen units go two to three years, but two is the figure we’ll stand behind, so plan around that.
Better still, it uses no power at all until you activate it, and activation is a simple step you do yourself. That means it can sit in a drawer, or ship to you, or wait until the moment you actually need it, without burning a single day of its life. You start the clock, not the warehouse.
How it reports its position
This is where honesty matters more than sales talk, because this is not a GPS tracker and we’re not going to pretend it is.
It works on a similar principle to an Apple AirTag. Rather than carrying its own SIM and satellite fix, it reports its position by quietly using the enormous network of Android and iPhone handsets already in the world around it. When a phone passes near enough, the tracker’s location is relayed up to the platform, and it appears in your app.
What that gives you is a location that is accurate enough to put you in the right area — the right street, the right yard, the right unit. It is not the metre-perfect live feed you get from a wired S5 or S7 unit, and you should not rely on it as a live position. What it will do is tell you roughly where your property is, and crucially it keeps a location history, so you can see where it has been and the route it took. In a recovery situation, that history is often worth more than a single pin on a map.
Coverage follows people. In a town, a city, an industrial estate, a motorway, a port — anywhere with phones passing — it reports well. Somewhere genuinely remote with nobody around, it will go quiet until something moves nearby. That’s the honest trade-off for a device this small with no power supply and a two-year life.
Who it’s for
Think of it as the last chance saloon. It’s for the item where, if the worst happened, you’d have nothing at all to go on.
- Plant, tools and site equipment with no power supply to wire into
- Trailers, horseboxes, caravans and towable kit left standing for long periods
- Motorcycles, e-bikes and pedal cycles where there’s simply nowhere to hide a conventional unit
- Classic and stored vehicles that sit for months with the battery disconnected
- High-value cases, flight boxes and equipment that travels
- Anything valuable enough that you’d want one more card to play
One thing we’ll be straight about: this is a tracker for property you own. It is not a device for keeping tabs on another person. Covertly tracking someone in the UK is a criminal matter and a serious breach of data protection law, and we won’t supply or fit it on that basis. If that’s what you’re after, we’re not the installer for you.
The third layer
We don’t sell this as a replacement for anything. It’s an addition, and it works best as the third layer on top of what you already have.
Layer one is the immobiliser — the theft doesn’t happen at all. Layer two is your Thatcham-approved tracker — if the vehicle moves, it’s monitored live and recovered. Layer three is this: the small, silent, unpowered thing that a thief never found, still quietly reporting in long after everything else has been ripped out, jammed, or left behind.
Professional thieves know to sweep for trackers. They know what the common units look like and where they’re usually fitted. What they don’t sweep for is something they don’t recognise as a tracker in the first place.
Price
Ninety-nine pounds, fitted. That includes the two-year subscription and the phone app, with nothing further to pay during that period. You get live-style position updates and the full location history in the app from the moment you activate it.
For a device that might be the only reason you ever see a valuable item again, we think that’s fair.
Talk to us about it
This one is new to the market and we’re still finding all the places it can be useful, so if you’ve got an awkward item you’ve never been able to protect properly, that’s exactly the conversation we want to have.
Call Elite Car Security on 03330 129 028, or get in touch here. We cover Essex, Hertfordshire and North London from our base in Cheshunt, with over thirty years in the trade and TASSA approval, member number 0009.