Why Range Rover values fell, and what has changed since
A theft problem became an insurance problem, and an insurance problem became a pricing problem. Here is what happened, with the figures, and where it leaves you now.
· 7 min read
If you own a Range Rover and have watched its value behave strangely over the last couple of years, you have not imagined it. Something specific happened, it was well documented at the time, and it had almost nothing to do with the cars themselves.
This is the sequence, with the figures and where they came from, and an honest account of what has changed since.
A theft problem first
Keyless entry made a certain kind of theft straightforward. Relay attacks let thieves capture and repeat the signal from a key sitting inside a house, and high-value SUVs with strong resale demand were the obvious target. Range Rovers were hit hard.
The scale was not marginal. DVLA figures reported at the time put more than 5,500 Range Rovers stolen across the UK in 2023.
Which became an insurance problem
Insurers price risk, and the risk had changed. Premiums on these cars moved sharply.
According to figures from Confused.com reported in December 2023, the average cost of insuring a Range Rover more than doubled in the year to that October, reaching around £3,270. Individual cases went far beyond the average — there were widely reported instances of owners quoted five-figure sums, and of owners who could not find cover at all at any price.
That is the part that matters for value, and it is worth being precise about why.
Which became a pricing problem
An expensive car to insure is a smaller car to sell.
A used Range Rover in that period was not competing for every buyer who wanted one. It was competing for buyers who wanted one and could get insured on one and were willing to absorb a premium that had doubled. Each of those conditions removes people from the pool. A smaller pool of buyers means softer prices, and it happens quickly.
The market reflected it. Auto Trader data reported in December 2023 put the average used Range Rover price down 9.3% over the preceding months, to around £35,224, a steeper fall than the wider used market over the same period. The Evoque was reported as the sharpest faller in the range.
Note what that is and is not. It is a snapshot of a specific period, reported at the time. It is not a claim about what your car is worth today, and anyone quoting those percentages to you in 2026 as though they were current is misusing them.
What Jaguar Land Rover did about it
This is the part that gets left out when the story is retold, and it changes the conclusion.
JLR invested around £15m in retrofitting security to cars already on the road, and rolled updates out to more than 65,000 vehicles. It reported that thefts of 2018 to 2022 Range Rover and Range Rover Sport models fell by more than 40% as a result.
It also went into the insurance market itself, launching a bespoke product for owners who had been priced out by the mainstream market.
So the underlying cause was addressed, and addressed at scale. That is not a small detail when you are trying to work out what your own car is worth.
Where that leaves you now
Three honest observations.
The acute phase has passed. The theft rates that drove the repricing came down substantially after the security programme. A story about 2023 is not automatically a description of 2026.
Market memory lags reality. Buyer sentiment moves slower than the underlying facts, and a reputation for being stolen outlasts the vulnerability that caused it. Some of the caution priced into these cars is now sentiment rather than risk.
Your specific car's history matters more than the category's. Whether the security update was applied to your vehicle is a real, checkable fact about your car, and it is a better guide to where you stand than any headline about the model.
We are not going to tell you what your Range Rover is worth today, for the same reason we do not print price tables anywhere else — we have written separately about what actually moves the number on a Range Rover, and none of it is a figure we could publish honestly in advance.
The part that works in your favour
Here is the thing about a discount driven by British insurance premiums and British theft statistics: it is British.
A buyer outside the UK is not pricing in a London insurance quote or a Home Counties theft rate. Those costs simply are not in their calculation. Which means the specific reason UK values on these cars softened is a reason that stops applying the moment the car leaves.
That is not a rhetorical flourish, it is the actual mechanism behind why our offers on certain Range Rovers are stronger than a general UK buyer's can be. We have set out the full reasoning, including its limits — it applies to cars under about five years old and to one market, and we say so rather than implying it applies to everything.
Did this hit the whole range equally?
No, and the differences are instructive.
The cars most affected were the ones the theft problem actually targeted: the full-size Range Rover and the Range Rover Sport, concentrated in the model years where the vulnerability existed and the security update had not yet been applied. Those are the cars where insurance quotes moved most violently, and where the buyer pool thinned fastest.
The Evoque's position was different. It was reported as the sharpest faller by percentage during that period, but an Evoque is a cheaper car competing in a much larger and more crowded segment, and percentage falls on smaller numbers behave differently from percentage falls on large ones. A high-volume compact SUV has its own supply-and-demand story running underneath any insurance headline, and separating the two is not something you can do from a news article. If you own one, the Evoque page sets out what actually drives its value, and the honest answer is that service history and how the car was used matter more than the theft narrative ever did.
The Velar sits somewhere between the two, and its value story is dominated by something else entirely — which specification and which infotainment generation you have.
The general lesson is worth stating plainly: a headline about "Range Rover values" is a headline about a badge, not about a car. Yours has a generation, an engine, a specification and a history, and those will tell you far more than any range-wide percentage.
What we are not claiming
To be clear about the limits of everything above.
We are not saying your car is worth less than you think. We have no idea what your car is worth until we look at it, and neither does anyone quoting you a figure from a headline.
We are not saying values have recovered to where they were. We do not have data that would support that claim, so we are not making it.
We are not saying the theft risk is solved everywhere. Security updates were applied to a large number of cars, not to every car, and whether yours received one is a question about your vehicle rather than about the model.
What we are saying is narrower and, we think, more useful: a well-documented episode explains a lot of the strangeness owners have seen in these values, the cause was addressed, and the discount it created was always specific to this market.
What to do if you are selling one
Find out whether your car had the security update. It is a genuine value question and most sellers have never been asked it.
Do not accept a valuation from anyone who did not ask which generation, which engine and which specification you have. On these cars those are not details, they are the price.
And get more than one offer. That advice costs us business occasionally and we give it anyway, because a seller who has compared properly is a seller who knows what a good number looks like. Ask each buyer the same question: is that figure what you will actually pay when you see the car, or an opening position? The answers will separate them faster than the numbers do.
If you would like a firm figure for your specific car, we will give you one within two hours, from someone who trades these rather than a valuation tool. It stands for seven days and it does not change when we collect.
Tell us your registration, or read what we look for on a Range Rover first.
