John Deere is making its Gator utility vehicles harder to steal by installing anti-theft technology on all of its new XUV and HPX models as standard.

The Construction and Agricultural Security and Registration (Cesar) scheme uses a range of security marking technologies supplied by Datatag ID to discourage theft or help recover stolen equipment.

These include tamper-evident plates, with a unique registration number for each piece of equipment, radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, “forensic DNA” and Datadots to give each machine a unique fingerprint thieves cannot remove.

See also: Gator gives slug pellet application a boost

Theft

According to the Metropolitan Police’s Plant and Agricultural National Intelligence Unit (Paniu), about 200 UTVs are stolen each year in the UK, with about half being John Deere Gators.

Following the success of Cesar in reducing tractor theft from dealers and farms, John Deere is hoping the same technology can help reduce thefts of its UTVs.  

Insurance premiums

John Deere marketing manager Chris Wiltshire said the company has an ongoing responsibility to address the concerns of customers over the security of their machinery.

The Cesar system is a proven method of protecting against theft, successfully recovering stolen equipment and reducing insurance premiums Chris Wiltshire, John Deere

“The Cesar system is a proven method of protecting against theft, successfully recovering stolen equipment and reducing insurance premiums.

“With this announcement, we are very happy to demonstrate our continued support of the system by fitting Cesar as standard from now on to our Gator UTV range,” he said.

Datatag ID managing director Kevin Howells said he was delighted John Deere had decided to expand its support of Cesar.

“I have every confidence that this move will be as successful for Gators as it has been for tractors in reducing theft,” he added.

Cesar is widely recognised to have contributed to an overall drop in equipment theft of more than 60% since its introduction in 2007.

Many leading insurers offer discounts for all Cesar-marked equipment.