By Stefano Peduzzi, vice president, technology solutions and operations Europe, Geotab

Stefano Peduzzi, vice president, technology solutions and operations Europe, Geotab

Across Europe, the organised networks behind the most high-value commercial vehicle theft have become specialists. They study fleet protection systems, map the weak points, and plan around them.

Most fleets are still protecting assets on assumptions formed before that shift happened. Here are four myths worth reconsidering.

Myth 1: Fitting a tracker means the vehicle can be located

Organised theft networks plan around trackers. Signal jammers are cheap, widely available and routinely used by the professional groups responsible for the majority of high-value commercial vehicle theft across Europe. The window between a vehicle leaving a depot and a tracker being detected and disabled is shorter than most fleet managers assume. A single device, however well-fitted, can be defeated by defeating that device.

The consequence is a lost asset, a contract failure, an insurance claim and a customer without a vehicle — often at the same time. Location rates improve when tracking is treated as a system with no single point of failure, rather than a single piece of hardware doing a job it can’t do alone.

Myth 2: Factory-fitted tracking alone is sufficient

Factory-fitted telematics are built primarily for vehicle operation, not fleet security. The signals, communication paths and data they provide are excellent for what they’re designed to do. Some models compound this further. On certain vehicles, the driver can switch the vehicle into privacy mode, cutting data transmission entirely. It’s a legitimate data protection feature, however, from a fleet security standpoint, it creates a gap that organised theft groups have learned to exploit. A second independent layer, installed separately and operating on different signal paths, doesn’t share that vulnerability. The combination produces redundancy that a single source, no matter how good, can’t replicate. Redundancy is what organised theft networks haven’t found a way to defeat systematically.

Myth 3: Theft can’t be predicted. You can only react.

Most fleet managers think of vehicle location as a reactive process: a vehicle goes missing, an alert is triggered, the search begins. By that point, the window is already closing. Geofencing rules, night movement detection and high-risk country border alerts can flag suspicious behaviour before a theft is confirmed. Geotab’s AI algorithms, for instance, adjust reporting frequency automatically in areas and time windows with elevated theft risk: surfacing unusual movement patterns long before a driver reports anything missing.

The difference between locating a vehicle and writing it off is often measured in minutes. Detection before confirmation is where those minutes are won.

Myth 4: The same approach works across every European market

A method calibrated for Italy may be poorly suited to Germany, Ireland or Spain. The factors driving vehicle theft differ sharply by country, as do the networks behind it. Organised crime groups operate along specific corridors and tend to move vehicles quickly across borders — into jurisdictions where location and recovery become legally complicated. Police response times vary. Cross-border frameworks differ in every market.

A fleet running across eight European countries faces a different threat map than one operating in a single market. Protection designed for that complexity from the outset performs differently from a single-country approach applied everywhere and hoped for the best.

What connects all four myths is the same underlying assumption: that protecting vehicles is a product decision rather than a systems one. Geotab built its stolen vehicle recovery approach on the opposite premise: that professional theft networks will eventually probe every layer, so redundancy isn’t optional. Multi-layered tracking across independent signal paths, AI-driven detection that flags movement anomalies before a theft is confirmed, and coordination through established security operating centres. The fleets that have adopted it are running location rates well above the industry average across European markets.