A Zipcar a day gets stolen in SF – here's how they stole mine | Hacker News Reader

A Zipcar a day gets stolen in SF – here's how they stole mine

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22 pointsdarrennix22 comments

>Given that Zipcar has had 16 years of experience having cars stolen, they must have decided that it would cost more to install cutoff devices in the fleet than to buy some extra cars every year.

I'm sure that GPS tracking makes it pretty easy to recover these cars. They probably get them back pretty quickly.

I guess that makes them pretty good bait cars for the police too (if they're interested). If every cop sat on a zipcar while they're doing their paperwork, they'd probably catch somebody trying to steal one every once in a while.

I'd imagine killing the engine could have potential liability issues if they cut it off at a dangerous time whereas GPS tracking lets them hand off that responsibility to the police.

This was surprising to me! I always figured my Zipcar wasn't much of a target for thieves because: It has a big Zipcar logo emblazoned on it (slows down turnaround of the car if you're trying to sell it), it has the custom Zipcard locking mechanism, which is tied into the car's alarm system, and each car has GPS in it, which you'd think would lead the cops right to them.

Wondering what use these cars are to thieves? Is it just a quick way to grab a ride somewhere (maybe out of town)? Are they actually selling these cars intact to people to be repainted/refitted and sold? Or are they sold for scrap/parts?

(edit: formatting)

I would guess they take it to a chop shop and sell it for parts, but I'm not sure how plausible that is since they have GPS (or maybe they all get caught). Perhaps the thieves know the cars have GPS and can disable it in some way before they get to the chop shop.

Maybe a chop-shop with a drive-in faraday cage?

Maybe they wrap the whole car in chainmail on the side of the road

I'm a former Zipcar employee. There are some interesting things about Zipcars, one being that if the car can't get a phone signal, it will allow any Zipcard to unlock it (since the car can't know for sure if that card has a reservation).

Also, in the UK, there were instances of the more expensive cars being taken to garages and having some parts swapped out for cheaper parts and sold on the black market.

> Zipcar can track the cars using GPS but they told me they can’t turn off the engine remotely.

A less extreme (and litigious) option could be to just turn on the car's alarm remotely. It would make the prospect of stealing one far less attractive to thieves if it was known that the alarm would start blaring at some random point after they've driven off with it.

You cant have a remote cutoff option due to lawsuits. What if a zipcar got turned off on the highway and caused an accident, they would be sued

How could killing the engine cause an accident? I guess it could be a problem if you were stopped on a railroad crossing, but really?. Pretty much all cars on sale today come with an immobilizer built in, and services like lojack and onstar allow you to activate it remotely.

> Pretty much all cars on sale today come with an immobilizer built in, and services like lojack and onstar allow you to activate it remotely

Doesn't that just not let you start the car? I don't think it turns off the car.

edit: according to [1], OnStar "can limit the speed at which it can be driven, remotely lock the ignition so that it can’t be started, and track the car’s location".

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/09/07/how-tech-mak...

(as for the original question, even ignoring situations where you need to have acceleration to get out of them, just cut the power steering on someone who has never driven without it and see how well they pull over to the side of a busy intersection or the like)

> just cut the power steering on someone who has never driven without it and see how well they pull over to the side of a busy intersection or the like

Having had power steering (and power everything else) go out on me in an F250, it's pretty much kind of terrifying. Brakes? Sort of. Steering? Sure, if you put your back into it.

Slowing down, without lights, unexpectedly in traffic while modern day humans pay no attention to driving by using their phone? Seems totally likely to cause an accident.

Stopping the engine also means you'd loose power steering, and more importantly power brakes.

How about disabling the car once the crooks park it?

And lock the doors before they can get out! Send the police.

One of the isuue, and probably what the thief are gaming is how it takes to be reported.

Why won't the thieves disconnect the GPS/reader from the zipcar after they have broken in? Is that actually tamper-proof?

Fascinating. As member I've always thought it would be a lot of temptation to leave these cars around with the keys in plain sight, and assumed there was a cut-off capability. It seems like it would be pretty inconvenient for members if it happened that often while in use.

I always assumed that the ecu was cut off until the card was read and checked. Except it would cache in case of parking outside of 2g range.

If whenever there was connectivity the reader pulled of a list of card allowed to unlock the car on that day, and with a lookahead of a few days in the future.

Then I think something like that would be fairly guaranteed to work.

Could it just be double-booking?

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