Apple AirTag A Brilliant Car Tracker As This Road Test Proves

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An Apple AirTag could be used to track all manner of things: people, belongings, pets and even vehicles. But is a $29 device really up to the job of tracking the whereabouts of your car - especially if it’s stolen? I’ve spent the past week using the AirTag to track my partner’s car, as she goes about her daily commute and everyday life. Here’s what I’ve found - and why the AirTag might well prove to be worth every cent if your car is stolen. The key question I suspect most people want answered is could the AirTag help track down a stolen car. I’d give that a qualified ‘yes’. Let’s be clear about the AirTag’s limitations right up front. This is not a great device for live tracking. Don’t think that if you see your car being stolen off the drive, you’ll be able to see a little dot moving across Apple Maps, plotting the car’s live journey. It’s not a GPS tracker and the updates provided from an AirTag are sporadic. The AirTag works by connecting to nearby iPhones or iPads using ultra-wideband technology. That has a maximum range of about 30ft (9m). The key thing is that the AirTag doesn’t have to lock on to your iPhone to provide a location - it will latch onto any modern iPhone or iPad. If your car thief happens to have an iPhone on them, the updates might be regular. If not, you could be waiting ten minutes, half an hour or even hours between location updates, because it will need someone to pass close by with an iPhone/iPad. This obviously means that the AirTag is a much better tracker in busy urban environments than it is in rural areas. If your stolen car is dumped down a quiet country lane or in the middle of nowhere, the chances of your AirTag locking onto a nearby iPhone are obviously greatly reduced. That said, the AirTag has managed to accurately locate the parked location of my partner’s car every time this week. When she’s parked the car at work, the location has even been accurate enough to reveal what part of the open-air car park she’s parked in, meaning I’d be confident of finding the vehicle if it were stolen and dumped with the AirTag inside. One of the advantages of using an AirTag rather than a GPS system to track a vehicle is that it can still locate cars in underground car parks, such as the one in the map above, for example. And if you’re trying to locate your vehicle in said car park, the ‘Precise Finding’ feature (only available on iPhone 11 or 12 models) might even help you pinpoint the car’s exact location in that car park, although by the time Precise Finding kicks in you’ll probably be able to see the car anyway. Note from the screenshot that the Find My app provides a precise address for the AirTag’s location, complete with postcode (or zip code), as well as a time for when it was last located. That information could be vital if you’re trying to convince the police to attend to a stolen vehicle, for instance.

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