Buying a GPS tracker for a car in India

The two kinds

Wired, SIM-based trackers report their own position over a mobile network. They give live location, speed, trip history and geofence alerts, and they draw power from the car so they never need charging. They cost money every month, and they are installed somewhere a workshop can reach.

SIM-free tags carry no modem. They are found by passing phones on Apple’s Find My or Google’s Find Hub network, cost nothing to run, fit anywhere because they need no wiring, and tell you where the car was last seen rather than where it is going.

How the SIM-free kind works

A SIM-free tracker does not know where it is. It has no GPS chip, no antenna listening to satellites and no mobile connection of its own. What it does is repeat a short Bluetooth signal, over and over.

Any nearby phone running Apple’s Find My network or Google’s Find Hub network hears that signal, notes its own location, encrypts the pair and passes it on. You open the app and see where a phone was when it last heard your tracker. The phone’s owner learns nothing: they never see the tracker, and the location is encrypted so that neither Apple nor Google can read who was where.

The consequence worth understanding before you buy: the tracker is only as good as the phones around it. In a city, phones are everywhere and updates arrive constantly. On an empty highway at three in the morning nothing hears it, and the last known position is where it stays until someone walks past.

Which one you actually need

Buy the subscription tracker if you are managing a vehicle rather than owning one: a car someone else drives, a fleet, a taxi - anything where you care about routes and speed as they happen.

Buy the SIM-free tag if the question you want answered is “where is my car now”, after a theft or in a car park you cannot remember. It is also the right answer for a second car that sits for weeks, where a subscription is money spent on nothing.

Where to fit one in a car

A car has more hiding places than a bike and fewer of them get wet. Under a seat rail, inside the boot lining, in the spare-wheel well, behind a door card or up inside the dashboard all work. Avoid the glovebox and the centre console - both get opened casually - and avoid burying it in the metal of the boot floor.

As with a bike, check the app once it is in place. A tag deep in a wheel well surrounded by steel may not be heard.

Questions worth asking a seller

• Is there a subscription, and what happens when it lapses?
• Which network does it use, and is it reachable from both iPhone and Android?
• What powers it, and what do I do when that runs out?
• What is the warranty, and who pays return shipping?
• Is the position live, or last-seen?

The last one catches people out most often. A listing that says “real-time” about a Bluetooth tag is describing something the technology cannot do.

Frequently asked questions

Do car GPS trackers need a subscription?

SIM-based ones do, because they pay for mobile data. SIM-free tags on Find My or Find Hub do not - there is no network of their own to pay for.

Can police use a tracker to recover a car?

A last-known location is useful information to give them, but recovery is their decision and their operation. Report the theft first; the tracker supports the report, it does not replace it.

Will a tracker drain my car battery?

A wired one draws a small current continuously, which matters on a car left standing for weeks. A coin-cell tag draws nothing from the car at all.