Range Rovers are some of the most popular luxury vehicles in the UK, and for good reason. They meet the perfect balance between practicality, performance, luxury and road presence, all in one sleek vehicle. Unfortunately, it comes as no surprise that they are some of the most stolen cars in the UK. Luckily, there is a way to disable keyless entry easily and in just a couple of minutes. All you need is the keyless fob and the car.
There are multiple factors which go into why Range Rovers are stolen to often, but the 2 main reasons are the sheer value and desirability, as well as how easy they are for thieves to steal. Now we can’t do anything about the demand for them on the black market, but disabling keyless entry is absolutely essential in helping to make sure yours isn’t stolen. This works on a majority of newer Range Rover and Land Rover models which have keyless entry fitted, so it’s worth giving it a try.
1. Unlock the Door and Sit in the Driver’s Seat
The first step is pretty self explanatory – unlock the driver’s side door and sit in the driver’s seat with the key in your hand. If you needed to press a button on the key to unlock the door, you probably have keyless entry disabled already. On the other hand, if the car unlocked from you touching the door handle, then read on…
2. Press The Key’s Buttons in This Sequence
Above is a picture of the most common modern Range Rover key. The buttons we are going to need are the headlight button, and the unlock button.
With the key in your hand, you’re going to want to press the headlight flash button (probably bottom left) three times, followed by the unlock button (top right). Doing this in quick succession, for a total of 4 button presses, should disable your keyless entry. You aren’t going to know if this step has worked or not until you’ve completed step 3, because annoyingly it seems most models don’t have any kind of way to notify you that keyless entry has been disabled.
3. Get Out of The Car and Lock It
Once you’ve fiddled with the key fob, get out of the car, shut the door, and lock it. Now, when you try to unlock the car just by using the handle, it should no longer let you. Congratulations! You’ve just made your Range Rover a lot more difficult to steal.
Here’s an important thing to consider though – if you’ve got used to locking the car by pressing on the handle, try to remember that you now need to lock it via the key. It seems that on most or all models, disabling keyless entry makes the entire mechanism on the door stop working, which is a good thing. Just remember to lock it from the key from now on.
4. You Still Need to Be Careful
This isn’t really a step, moreso a warning. Even when keyless entry has been disabled, the key may still be emitting a signal, which thieves can use for relay theft. I unfortunately haven’t been able to conclusively test whether or not the key continues to emit a signal even after keyless entry is disabled, so I think it’s worth playing it safe. Get a good quality, police approved faraday pouch such as the Disklabs KS1, which I’ve reviewed and continue to recommend on a near daily basis.
This will ensure that even if they break a window to get into the car, they still won’t be able to drive off without physically having the key.
To be a thieves worst nightmare, there are a couple of additional options you may want to consider. Firstly, if you park the car on your land, I would highly recommend forking out a bit of cash on a good quality driveway bollard, and also a ghost immobiliser if you want to get space age with it. For the uninitiated, a ghost immobiliser is an invisible system you can fit to your Range Rover, which means that the car simply won’t start, even with the key, until a secret PIN code has been entered in.
The clever part is that the buttons used to enter the PIN are already in the car. A common PIN configuration would be to make use of the built-in steering wheel buttons, such as volume up and volume down. These devices are incredibly hard for thieves to detect, which will leave them scratching their heads as to how to drive the thing away, even in the unfortunate case where they have managed to physically steal your key and get into the car.
All in all, a good ghost immobiliser, faraday bag and bollard can all be had for under £1000 combined, and that includes installation if you’re in the right area.
Bonus – How To Re-enable Keyless Entry in a Range Rover.
When selling the vehicle, it’s important to consider re-enabling keyless entry, as a number of less security-conscious buyers may want to take the risk and use keyless entry. Not to worry, it’s not too painstaking to get it working again.
All you need to do is perform the exact same steps as disabling keyless entry, but instead of pressing the unlock button after pressing the headlight button 3 times, press the lock button. It’s easy to test if it’s properly been re-enabled of course, so I won’t walk you through that.
Conclusion – a Majority of Newer Range Rovers Can Have Keyless Entry Disabled
Surprisingly, unlike BMW, Range Rover actually let their owners easily turn off keyless entry on a wide range of models, which is an absolute godsend. It’s strange that Jaguar Land Rover, or JLR, don’t spend more time explaining how to do this, because it could have saved them from a PR nightmare.
I know, when you hands are full it’s actually a pretty great feature to have, but the immense vulnerabilities that open when car makers fit keyless technology is disappointing to say the least. To Range Rover’s credit, they have started to come up with a few ways to try to protect their owners, and of course their vehicles. One such idea has been to disable the signal emitted from the key if it hasn’t been moved for a certain period of time, but it’s important to note that on the Land Rover site, they also recommend using a faraday bag.
As a final takeaway, I just want to make you aware – it’s impossible to test this on every single model, so it may not work for all of them. Additionally, at any moment Range Rover could decide to no longer keep this feature as a possibility, so please don’t buy one based on the above information, until you’ve checked that you can actually disable its keyless entry functionality, assuming that’s a firm requirement.