Range Rovers have become a top target for car thieves across the borough with reports of a large number of high-tech heists.

Most of the thefts were 'key less' where the robbers effectively steal the electronic code to unlock and start the car.

This is most often done by scanning the owner's key – often through a letterbox.

Vehicles worth hundreds of thousands of pounds have been stolen from the Kew area alone, while similar thefts of Range Rovers and Porches have happened in other parts of the borough.

Richmond Police told Nub News: "Between the dates June 5, 2022 and September 22, 2022 there were eight thefts of vehicle on Kew ward. Of those, six were Range Rovers and two Porsches.

"The majority were 'keyless' thefts and we have distributed advice about presenting this at our Ward Panel meetings, Community Contact Sessions and online."

Typically the thieves will steel a Range Rover or Porsche and drive it off to a street nearby, where they will leave it to establish whether it has a tracker on it and see if it has been recovered.

At least one local victim reported seeing the thieves drive off in the car even though they were inside their home with the keys. Another received a series of parking tickets for their stolen car from a street a few miles away.

Looking across London as a whole, the Metropolitan Police recorded 7,376 thefts of Land Rovers between the beginning of 2019 and the end of January 2022.

The true scale of the thefts is likely to be higher, according to Dr Ken German, a vehicle crime consultant and former officer in the Met's stolen car squad.

He said that when a car is taken as part of a burglary on a home it is categorised as a theft of property and not as theft of a car.

The DVLA has revealed that Range Rovers were the second most stolen vehicles in 2021, behind the Ford Fiesta.

There are reports that these vehicles and sent overseas to as far away as Albania and Thailand, where they are seen a status symbols.