In something of a remarkable story, a couple in England recently used an AirTag to help locate and retrieve their stolen car. Originally brought to light by the BBC, the report relays that Mia Forbes Pirie and Mark Simpson noticed that their Jaguar had been stolen.
Recognizing that they had an AirTag in the car, the couple leveraged Apple’s somewhat inconspicuous tracking device and decided to track down the Jaguar themselves. Embarking on what could have potentially been an ill-advised or dangerous escapade, the couple at the very least did make a point to relay their plan to local police officials.
“I wanted to act quite quickly,” Pirie said, “as my fear was that we would find the AirTag and not the car when it was discarded on to the street without the car, so I told them that we were planning to head to the location.”
Upon tracking their car down, they found it parked on a quiet street and were able to reclaim it.
The fact that the couple managed to retrieve their car is something of an anomaly. The report notes that most cases involving stolen cars in the UK go unsolved. As a quick aside, it’s worth noting that crime data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau reveals that the rate of stolen cars in the United States dropped by a whopping 17% in 2024. This marks the most drastic drop in year-over-year car thefts in four decades, a development that’s partly due to more robust security measures.
AirTag 2 might be on the way
While we did see some rumors that AirTag 2 might be announced at WWDC, that didn’t come to pass. Still, rumors of an updated AirTag persist, and it stands to reason we’ll see it happen sometime before the end of the year.
Apple originally released its first-gen AirTag in April of 2021, which is to say an update is arguably overdue. As to what features we might see in AirTag 2, rumblings from the rumor mill point to enhanced security and a more advanced ultra-wideband chip, which will make it easier to ascertain its exact location from an even greater distance. There are also reports that the AirTag 2 speaker will be much harder to tamper with compared to its predecessor.
Specifics regarding the enhanced security features are a bit murky, but over the past few years, Apple has taken steps to make AirTag less useful for bad actors like stalkers.
