Do you hide radio ?

[Rosamund1]

DH always insists on the car radio front panel being put into the glove compartment when we leave the car and gets upset if it is left on display. I humour him, but nowadays surely thieves and druggies are better off stealing phones and laptops and don’t bother with car radios.

Do you take out your radio?

We hide the sat nav in the glove compartment, I suppose to discourage a thief from smashing the window to grab it and sell on eBay, but a car radio is no longer floggable I think. No physical bar lock or anything like that. Car is about 12 years old.

How old is your car? aren't they glued in nowadays?

@Derelictwreck. I think the thought process is that a thief wants to be quick and not waste time looking for the front. Also, we could have taken it with us. If I did that though it would get lost somewhere.

@martellandginger. The radio is about 5 years old as the original did not have Bluetooth.

There is no way that any thief is interested in a radio that is old enough to be removeable. In the remote likelihood that they are, the glove compartment is the first place they'd look, because they would also be looking for a satnav.

Double-clutching is melting my mind! How do you have time to out gear in neutral, and then choose next year, whilst driving along?

My car was broken into. They stole my Now That's What I Call Xmas cd , my anti fog spray , and even weirder, my electric tire pump . Radio stayed where it was, even though it's highly removable, and my fiance used to remove it 'for safety'.

Oh so you bought a new fandangled one. in that case if I had a good radio in my old car yes I would hide the radio.

I do have a 6 year old crappy sat nav that I don't hide but I take off screen and put next to handbrake. In case chancers are lazy and don't look inside my car properly.....Mind you where I used to live it was a bonus when my car hadn't been nicked. Nobody wants to joy ride in a mum looking car :)

Still stolen regularly in Leicester along with anything else that isn't nailed down. Couple of the markets often have entire boxes full of them for a few quid each often visible wires cut at the back.

he's a bit obsessive OP

I used to but that was in my first car (RIP little Micra) when I was 20.

Had a couple of cars since that and nothing removable.

Now I have a built in screen etc so no removing it. Can't see that a radio faceplate are much of a draw these days are they?

I have an upgraded stereo in mine, and i do take the front off but i dont leave it in the car!

Goodness I had entirely forgotten about removable radio fronts! That brings me back to spending my first relationship trailing round Halfords after my boyfriend who was always looking for ways to make his 1.0 litre saxo more noisy and shiny.

I’m amazed you can still buy removable ones. I though Noah had dropped them over the side!

Until recently (when I bought this car with built in Sat Nav) I used to remove the Sat Nav from the windscreen, rub off the mark it left on the windscreen & mostly put it in the glovebox, I’d only take it with me if people were hanging around. All simply to cut down the chances of having the car broken into, so I guess I’d probably have done the same with a radio. Getting glass replaced on cars is a right faff.

...hence refusing to buy a car without a built in sat nav.

Mine doesn't come out. It always makes me laugh when I see a 20 year old rust bucket in a car park with a crook lock. Do they seriously think anyone's going to even think about nicking it?

PhilODox. Nah, it’s just a quick ‘up & down’ it very soon becomes habit, like everything else with driving. I loved driving my Fiat 500, it was so cute!

I learnt to drive on farmland in my early teens, in elderly vehicles that you had to double declutch on - once you know how to do it, it becomes a smooth operation. My husband said that it was an explanation for my heavy clutch foot later, though. Have lived in town for years and have an automatic - can't imagine going back to any kind of manual gear for town stop/start traffic.

Was helping out a friend on her farm last year ( so,decades on) and she asked me to fetch a trailer that was attached to a classic (ie. older than the dinosaurs but fashionably retro ) farm vehicle . Whooo ! Like riding a bike, all came back, drove it smoothly up the track, with my friend doubled over at my manic grin.

I drive an old car that has a radio with a removable control panel. The dratted panel keeps dropping off when I drive. A particularly lovely feature of my old wreck! I love the car though so will forgive anything, even the panel-poltergeist.

My boss once had his BMW stolen but the thief left his cds behind in a pile in the parking spot. AND he told us. If my music taste was so bad a thief did that I wouldn't be telling my employees!

All!! That’s hilarious!