It reads like something out of a movie – probably starring Jason Statham or George Clooney – but this one happened in real life.
Last Tuesday, a group of thieves drove a truck right into a Jaguar Land Rover plant in the UK and drove back out with a trailer full of engines. As if that weren’t brazen enough, they came back two hours later and did it again.
According to the report from the Birmingham Mail, the matter was as simple as entering the facility, hitching up a trailer, and driving off – all of which (in the first instance) took less than six minutes. Despite driving a stolen truck, the thieves had their paperwork in order. So while the entire incident was thoroughly captured on security cameras, their arrival and departure through the security gates raised no eyebrows until long afterward.
All told, they’re said to have stolen some two trailers full of engines, the total value of which comes to an estimated £3 million – or $3.75m at current exchange rates. The stolen truck was reportedly later found abandoned, but the engines were not.
The heist went down at JLR’s plant in Solihull, just south of Birmingham in the West Midlands – the heart of the UK’s automotive industry. Though the company manufactures most of its engines in Wolverhampton (on the other side of Birmingham), it installs them into a wide variety of vehicles it assembles at Solihull – including the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Land Rover Discovery, Jaguar F-Pace, and Jaguar XE.
The Solihull plant is just over an hour away from Milton Keynes, where thieves made off with a truckload of trophies from the Red Bull Racing headquarters about two years ago.
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