Alloy rims are stolen because they are anonymous and easy to sell. Engraving removes the second half of that sentence.
A set of alloy rims can be off a car in the time it takes to have lunch. They are worth real money, they are quick to remove, and once they are off they look exactly like every other set of that size. That last part is the one that makes the trade work, and it is the only part an owner can change.
Why rims specifically
Most vehicle parts are hard to sell on. They are model-specific, they carry numbers, or a buyer wants provenance. Rims are none of those things. A common size fits hundreds of vehicles, there is a steady second-hand market, and nothing on the rim says who owned it. A buyer asking no questions is not being reckless. There is nothing to ask about.
The insurers' own figures point the same way. In the Association of Kenya Insurers' report on vehicle theft in 2024, theft of parts was the largest category of reported incidents, at 54.28%, ahead of cars stolen while parked (31.91%) and hijackings (7.24%). Only 15.32% of stolen vehicles were recovered.
Engraving changes what a buyer is looking at. A rim carrying a permanent code is a rim with a history, and a seller who cannot explain the code has just answered the question for you.
What this does and does not do: it does not stop a wheel being removed. Nothing on a wheel does. What it does is make the removed wheel difficult to convert into money, which is the only reason it was taken. Deterrence here works on resale, not on the act.
What gets marked
Usually a short code, not a registration number. There are two reasons for that. Registrations change when a car is sold, and a rim outlives several owners. And a registration painted onto a wheel is a piece of personal information sitting in a car park all day.
A code works better: unique, meaningless to a stranger, and recorded against you. Where a fleet is involved, the code carries the vehicle number and the position (front left, rear right), because that also tells a workshop which wheel came off which vehicle, a nuisance any fleet manager will recognise.
The mark goes on the inner face of a spoke or the barrel: visible to anybody who looks, invisible to anybody who does not, and not on a surface that gets kerbed. It is cut into the metal, so it does not come off with a polish or a repaint.
Where it fits in the rest of the vehicle
Vehicle identity marking, at KSh 4,000 a vehicle, is the broader version of the same idea and it is usually done in one visit: rims, windows, and any part worth taking on its own. For fleets, the same session normally covers engraved plates (KSh 3,000 a set) for internal numbering, so a yard of identical vehicles stops being identical.
The small piece people forget is the paperwork. A vehicle's documents live in the car and get handled constantly; a branded insurance pocket (KSh 100 each, from 100) keeps them in one place and legible, which matters at exactly the moment nobody wants to be searching a glovebox.
Doing it properly
Three things separate marking that helps from marking that just looks thorough.
- Record it on the day. A code nobody wrote down proves nothing. The register (code, vehicle, position, date) is the part that makes it useful to an insurer or to the police, and it is the part most often skipped.
- Mark all four, and the spare. A thief taking three is still a thief with a problem, but a spare is the wheel that disappears quietly and is noticed months later.
- Say it is done. A small window sticker stating that the wheels are marked does more work than the marking itself, because deterrence needs to be visible before the wheel is removed, not after.
The register is worth one more sentence, because it is the part that quietly decides whether any of this was useful. It does not need software. A spreadsheet with five columns (code, vehicle, wheel position, date marked, who marked it), kept somewhere other than the vehicle, is enough. What matters is that it exists on the day and that somebody other than the person who commissioned the work knows where it is. A register held only in the head of a fleet manager who has since left the company is the commonest way a marking scheme becomes decorative.
For fleets, this is usually part of a wider asset exercise, not a separate job. The same visit that marks the vehicles marks the workshop equipment, and the on-site engraving guide explains how those days are organised.
Sources: Citizen Digital, Association of Kenya Insurers vehicle theft report for 2024 (news, March 2025) (read 14 Oct 2026).
Common questions
Does engraving damage the rim or affect balance?
No. The mark is a fraction of a millimetre deep and a few centimetres across, placed on a structural face away from the bead seat and the balance weights. It removes an amount of metal too small to measure against a wheel weighing several kilograms, and it does not break the finish in a way that lets corrosion start.
Can the code be removed or ground off?
It can be attacked, like anything else. But removing it means grinding into the face of an alloy wheel, which leaves an obvious scar exactly where a mark would have been. A rim with a ground patch on one spoke is a harder sell than a rim with a code, which is the point: the objective is not to be unremovable, it is to make removal look worse than the mark.
Do I need to do this at a workshop?
It is done where the vehicles are. The machine travels, and for anything more than a single car that is the only practical way: a yard of 20 vehicles is a morning on site and a fortnight if each one has to be driven somewhere. Nairobi visits come with the quote at no extra charge; for other counties the travel is priced in before you agree.
Will my insurer accept this as a security measure?
Insurers differ and none of this is a substitute for asking yours directly. What they generally want to see is a recorded scheme, not a mark on its own: the codes, what they refer to, and when they were applied. Keeping that register is the part that turns marking into something an insurer or an investigator can use.
