This is true in absolute terms but over simplified because it glosses over the differences in scale. We require cars to have seatbelts because even though people still die in crashes, it’s a statistically certainty that many fewer die when seatbelts are used.
Setting minimum standards is a critical function of governments in maintaining healthy markets because it prevents cheating from being cost effective. If you make a safety feature optional, you will have some fraction of people say that they don’t need it and then cost society money when it turns out they were wrong. In the case of poor locks, even if much of the cost is paid by the owners’ insurance there’s still a lot of expense from the extra police and court costs, and stolen cars are often used to support other crimes.
Thank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised at how illogical so many of these comments are. People talking about towing cars or picking locks acting as if it's not obvious what the distinction is here.
Yeah people, nothing can have perfect security. That's a given anyway. I think the point is that if you can steal it with a $250 device SDR device, the car's level of security is the issue not the device and that should be acknowledged by their government before they ban something that will do nothing except put these things in the hands of only the bigger crime groups. These things likely wouldn't be hard to manufacture by hand if these criminals wanted to get a hold of them.
> Thank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised at how illogical so many of these comments are.
Many commenters on HN lean libertarian, thus some will go through great lengths and mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that government regulation is (part of) the answer.
Seatbelts are not adversarial. A better seatbelt does not encourage other drivers to crash their cars into you even harder or anything like that, it's people versus nature.
Security systems are in a permanent arms race, people versus people. You could have a more expensive lock that requires a more expensive device to defeat, but this makes your car more expensive to make, so it has a higher price, so it becomes a more valuable target, and so on.
The problem is that I think these hands free remote start locks are more expensive than actual real physical locks which are immune to the types of attacks so that argument just actually doesnt work at all.
My bad, I was thinking in terms of the expensive remote start lock vs an even more expensive and safer remote start lock.
But if the fancy insecure lock is more expensive, the problem should fix itself eventually, right? Consumers will switch back to the cheaper system of their own accord.
It sucks for the people who bought the insecure cars without knowing, but banning insecure cars is not going to help them retroactively in any way.
Where I live the used car market is hot. It is hard to find a car made before 2012 because for the most part they are as reliable and fuel efficient as modern cars, are cheaper to repair, and cheaper to insure.
I dont think they are so desirable just because they are more secure but they dont have remote start options so they are at least in part more secure than modern remote start cars. The problem I am getting at is that there are no secure modern car options. None.
I don't think there can be such a thing as a secure remote start option. The only way they can make it more secure than traditional keys is if they also make it less convenient to use than traditional keys, and then there is no point because the traditional keys will be easier and cheaper.
What happened is that consumers did not know that the remote keys were unsafe, and now they know.
What I don't understand is why insecure cars should be banned by law. Now that everyone knows about the issue, surely everyone will switch to a more secure system of their own accord.
Yes. That’s why I listed it first as a separate category – it’s easy to see a stolen car as a loss of, say, $20-30k for the private insurance company and owner but there’s also going to be a cost for the time the police spend investigating, the city might spend disposing of a wrecked vehicle, the courts spend processing a car thief, etc. and potentially other significant costs if, say, a Kia challenge teenager hits another person or the vehicle is used to rob a house or business. While we can’t prevent it in absolute terms, there is still a significant social benefit to reducing car theft rates.
Insurance companies should reflect unlock vulnerability of a car model in its premiums. That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. What would help is a widely used certification system kept up-to-date by certification authorities in cooperation with insurance companies, similarly to what we have in place for a car model's fuel consumption.
> That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy.
It doesn't help that premium calculations are nonlinear and trade secrets. In the real world, it would take a computer and a large database to fuzzily estimate the impact of a particular car purchase on your personal premiums forecasted over the next few years with an error margin any less than a few hundred dollars per year (unless your life is particularly stable and well aligned to some major stereotype you can use to get a closer estimate).
If each insurer just published a table of the incremental impact of a given model of car (or better yet, how linear contributions for theft vs crash-rate vs death-rate-on-crash vs ...) then that'd be easy enough to use during purchasing. If you own a 90s civic in Oakland vs Redwood City though you're much more likely for the defective security measures to be used, and the insurers use a proxy for that information in their calculations, so in practice you have to get a personalized quote for every single car you might be interested in purchasing. Moreover, if you buy the car in a low-car-crime locale and move you can still be surprised by the massive rate hike [0]. And so on; modeling arbitrary risk is complicated, which is (part of) why professionals get paid the big bucks to do it. If there are other workable solutions, I'd prefer most of those to requiring the general public to have to do non-trivial math and statistics for every car purchase, especially above and beyond what they already have to do when estimating the total lifetime costs due to fuel economy or whatever.
[0] My personal solution was just to sell the car in that low-car-crime locale where it had a market value and buy a new vehicle in my destination, but then you're trading premiums for transaction costs, which isn't easy to model if you don't know how often you'll move in 5yrs either (hindsight, definitely worth it by a wide margin).
This penalizes unaware pre-existing car owners. Not only they got a crappy car, they now have to pay more for it - all because the vendor was sloppy. Doesn’t seem fair to me.
The responsible party should be the automaker that built or installed the security system, not the person who was sold a lie.
Or, you know, the people _stealing_ cars. I feel like this is bizarro world where what was previously accepted as adequate deterrence is now penalized because actual criminals have fewer and fewer incentives to follow established normal behaviors. “Maybe your face shouldn’t have been so punchable” is not a reasonable position to take, imho.
Flipper, lock picks, bolt cutters, etc. are all reasonable tools. So is the expectation that using them to commit a crime should result in penalty for the individual committing a crime using those tools, not the target of the crime they are committing.
Kia and Hyundai saved like $20/car by skimping on a part that all the other major manufacturers include by default, leading to cars that were insecure by design. That's negligent.
Punishing people for taking advantage of that vulnerability is certainly warranted, but it's also closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
What harm did Kia cause its customer? How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea, where there are 1:20,000 car thefts per capita yearly vs 1:350 in the US.
The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the problem.
I do agree that these crimes should hold stiff penalties like at least 5 years in prison, no possibility of parole, including 1st offense. Liberal city DAs have been shirking their responsibility for at least the past 15 years. It's usually a pretty small percentage of the population executing these types of crimes. No more revolving doors. If I owned a kia I'd add an after market shutoff. They're not that expensive, rather than crying over how awful my world is living in a first world nation with a brand new vehicle with a security fault.
I agree with the article; that regulating car manufacturers who make insecure cars is the correct approach. This specific case illustrates the effectiveness of the approach.
I read this view as: it’s fine to steal a car without an immobilizer. That’s an insane take (and why we can’t have nice things).
Meanwhile other modern countries (albeit with much stricter law enforcement and a more unified value system) can operate with 0.1% of the equivalent crime and that’s not what we aspire to. Instead we want to blame the manufacturer who must have certainly enticed antisocial, destructive behavior. What an awful and poisonous worldview.
It's worth noting that Hyundai and Kia actually ship different anti-theft technology in some of these other modern countries, because regulations in those other modern countries require it. The fact that the US doesn't require it (this article is about Canada, but other subthreads are talking about those manufacturers specifically).
It seems entirely reasonable to take the article's point of view which is "don't ban FlipperZero just because it can be used to facilitate car theft [among 1000 other uses], but rather regulate cars so that they become harder to steal".
Further, I realize you didn't put a ton of thought into the specific 0.1% figure, but I seriously doubt that other modern countries are 1000x better on equivalent crime measures than either the US or Canada.
In a bunch of scenarios (mining, military, boats, planes) the vehicles explicitly don't have locks or ignition keys, you press a button and it starts up, you're good to go - should the manufacturer be liable if one gets stolen?
No; each of those scenarios involves external access controls that are standard for those industries. (Fences, guards, controlled access.) It's nothing like the Kia/Hyundai scenario, where such vulnerabilities stemmed from not doing the industry standard thing (immobilizers).
Isn't police the external control? It is just that governments have failed to provide enough of these controls... So maybe they should be punished collectively for it?
> Isn't police the external control? It is just that governments have failed to provide enough of these controls...
I can only speak about US law, but there has been repeated case law that the police do not have a duty to protect any person in particular (except possibly when people are in their custody which isn't really relevant here).
The function of the police isn't to stop criminals in the act - given their response times that's largely impossible anyhow (well, outside of traffic violations). They largely deter crime by catching criminals after the fact.
The examples given like military facilities have secure fences, 24 hour guards, etc. They are actually secure facilities. As opposed to someone's driveway.
If you remove enough of the criminals from the population, you end up preventing crime in the long run. When it comes to car theft in particular, police also set up bait cars and then arrest the people who try and steal them. Well, at least that’s what they do in cities that still bother enforcing property crimes.
Even a surveillance state like China has crime - it’s not possible to deploy a police officer to every block and most people would find that objectionable for other reasons. Very few threats can be solved by a single countermeasure because the enemies are also intelligent and motivated.
US military vehicles might have a cable that locks to the steering wheel. So if you try to drive it, you can't steer well. But if not setup properly, it can be steered just fine.
> US military vehicles are protected by the "people with guns who will shoot you" industry standard.
Unless you are an MP, that stuff stays in the armory cage. And if you are headed to the range, ammunition is delivered separately to the range and systems are stringently checked for ammo before returning, afterwards they will do a lockdown inspection of the barracks and everyone's personal vehicles.
As long as they are regulatory compliant, there should absolutely not be any liability. If regulations are not updated fast enough maybe people responsible for that should be removed from office or punished.
We'll end up banning windows at this rate, they're an egregious vulnerability in cars and buildings alike. American cities, soft on crime, can't stop thieves from breaking windows so maybe they'll go after car manufacturers and construction firms instead. Going after companies instead of criminals is more aligned with their left-wing sensibilities, I think that's what this is really about.
Seems reasonable. Doors, windows, walls, roofs and sub-basements should be such that you cannot simply pass through them. After all it is now quite trivial to break through. And surely this is failure that builders should be responsible for.
Exactly! Those greedy builder corporations should only offer windows that have bars built into them so that homes can't get broken into. They save money by not incorporating the bars in the windows by default.
No. Windows balance a variety of competing needs - security, ventilation, egress during emergencies, mental health, lighting, etc. It would be, perhaps, egregiously negligent for a maximum security prison architect to install large plate glass windows in their cells, but having windows isn't automatically egregious. A car without windows (or with unbreakable ones) is a deathtrap in an accident; omitting them would be egregiously dangerous.
The same isn't true for, say, Kia/Hyundai's decision not to include immobilizers:
> CNN reported that only 26 per cent of Hyundai and Kia models from 2015 to 2019 were equipped with electronic immobilizers in the U.S., compared with 96 per cent of all other vehicles in those years, making the Hyundai and Kia models roughly twice as likely to be stolen.
Those stats make it pretty clear that immobilization was already the industry standard. Skipping them was like knowingly writing open SQL injection holes in a web application.
Egregious is subjective. You think it's egregious for cars to have locks which can be circumvented by thieves. Maybe I think it's egregious that construction firms don't install iron bars on all ground floor windows.
> CNN reported that only 26 per cent of Hyundai and Kia models from 2015 to 2019 were equipped with electronic immobilizers in the U.S., compared with 96 per cent of all other vehicles in those years, making the Hyundai and Kia models roughly twice as likely to be stolen.
If 96% of buildings in a neighborhood have iron bars over the ground floor windows, and you build a development in which only 26% of them do, yes... that's probably negligent, unless there are other factors to explain the discrepancy.
If theives start disproportionately breaking into your development's properties, your tenants can probably be a bit miffed about your lack of security measures.
dude, he was being facetious on purpose and used the term as a synonym to "shocking" to make the point that having windows are not really an egregious vulnerability. that's silly. the problem is criminals, not windows.
"Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks; there's always another circumvention.