KIA Dealership in Canada remotely disables car over $200 fee
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
1. Guy's mom pays off his car loan
2. Dealer says we installed a remote immobilizer to protect our loan
3. Dealer demands $200 to remove the device since the loan is paid off now
4. Guy understandably refuses
5. Dealer immobilizes car
I think this sort of behavior should mean the end of your dealership. I cannot quantify/identify the actual wrongdoing here but I'm pretty sure there is something illegal.
> Iny said Lallier's case is a good example of the conditions faced by borrowers with bad credit.
> "Immobilizers are most often seen in cases of sub-prime borrowers with questionable credit," he said. "The devices are very effective at keeping people on time with their payments."
EDIT: getting a lot of heat. Oh well, I guess I should've linked to 5 articles supporting what people in the industry already know.
If Dodge was bottom tier, there never would have been an $85,000 Dodge Viper.
And plenty of people would buy a Maxima before they would buy a Taurus.
The Korean automakers (Kia and Hyundai) both entered the US market on the bottom, but they have comparatively high quality at the price points they started at, price points that other automakers sell plenty of vehicles at.
The Dodge Viper is a notable exception but even FCA realized that it hurt sales and spun it off as a separate brand: SRT, which they discontinued this year, and with it, the Viper is dead. [2]
EDIT: down voting doesn't change the facts I stated above.
[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20170508/RETAIL01/305089965/... [2] http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/future-cars/news/a29664...
He's correct that Dodge and Nissan have low scores in these studies/surveys, but Hyundai and Kia [0] have improved their vehicle quality SIGNIFICANTLY in the last few years, and score at or near the top of these studies now.
However, Kia still has a reputation for terrible dealership experience. I don't have a link that shows this, so take that with a large grain of salt.
0. Hyundai owns 34% of Kia, but they have a strong internal rivalry
Disclaimer - I work for GM
Depreciation tells only one part of the story, and actually Kias are very high within their segment. Try comparing something like a Toyota Camry vs. Kia Optima - it's night and day difference.
Also a good way to figure out what used shitbox you should buy next if you want cheap parts. :)
They also represent the brand to the public, and (good) manufacturers care deeply about this perception and spend a lot of time and money tuning the dealership experience.
They're essentially loan sharks handing out cars instead of cash. They make a lot in interest, but they really make a lot by selling the same car again and again through very quick reposession (they do not mess around, weekly payments are standard). The same lot will sell many different makes, even higher end sometimes.
A lawyer might or might not use fancier words like "coercion" or "extortion," couldn't say.
In Canada, criminal law is under jurisdiction of federal government. Thus it is the same across the country, and crossing provincial borders does not change anything about the laws applying to the crime or how they are prosecuted.
They are asserting that it's their property, but they want to charge to get it back, and will punish you if you don't pay. Man, I love car dealerships.
You changed tense there, from present to past-tense. They charge $200 prior to removing it in order to remove it. There's no contradiction here.
uh what.
The issue here is more about how the dealership attempted to recover their property and the fee that he claims wasn't mentioned in the contract, not whether or not they actually owned the immobilizer.
I'm not that familiar with the Canadian legal system, but if its anything like the US its going to take more than a few days to work its way through the legal system. Just give it some time.
The problem is that petty injustices like this are hard to fight because finding other plaintiffs is hard. The only thing connecting them is the defendant, who is not interested in helping them find each other.
(In general, I believe that the sum of the damage of petty injustice is far greater than the major injustices that occasionally get some action on them, and that addressing these smaller injustices is a big juicy problem for society to solve.)
Breaking stuff out into fees can make sense when you want to discourage certain behaviors and therefore charge a fee for them. But everyone with a loan will have the device installed, maintained during the term, and removed at the end of the term or on default. There is not a behavior to modify, so these fees are stupid nonsense.
You're talking about the issue of the GPS removal being a separate fee, which is a different issue.
You buy a tesla, but oh it's not really yours to do with as you please. You agreed to terms on the software.
Get fucked by a company. Can't sue anymore, mandatory arbitration clauses.
Farmers can't fix their tractor anymore.
Your friend needs to find a new car, I think. That's insane. Why would you pay someone to do that to you?
I understand that it's more effort than just contacting a single company after immobilizing their fleet, but is a company with a fleet likely to have their cars equipped with immobilizers?
"It can be hacked" really only because good security practice like the above would involve extra costs and the dealership / hardware manufacturer have little incentive to do so. But as a maxim, it doesn't really work: good security is possible.
Those keys will end up somewhere in a database.
* hack a database to recover the symmetric key
* hack the private key repository needed for signing the requests
* do it all without being noticed / getting the key revoked
And really, all of those boil down to "gain unauthorized access to a system", which is to say now we can make the maxim "if it can be hacked, it can be hacked." That, I can agree with.
That being said, I think you're referencing the more common cases where these devices are used to disable vehicles on lease to customers. In that case the lease holder is not the owner, so yeah tampering with someone else's car is probably not legal. atleast on the surface that seems reasonable, I wouldn't want someone messing with my vehicle.
I'll agree that leasing agreements are often predatory and there is confusion over who's vehicle it is, but if you want ownership you really need to have purchased the title.
Whether they had a contractual right to request the fee for removal of the tracker is a different matter.
Also, even once the title for the car is transferred, the tracker remains the property of the dealer and they will have some rights to recover it.
I'm inclined say the tracker is part of the car, and the dealer has no rights over it (unless mentioned in the contract), similar to how a furnace, thermostat, or water heater is part of a house (because its nailed/bolted to the house).
(IANAL)
If the dealer left a ballpoint pen in the glove box, sure, you could make an argument that they retain ownership of it. But the lockout device is exactly as removable and as permanently affixed as the car stereo, or the headlights, or the transmission.
If you replaced the original manufacturer's car stereo with an aftermarket model, and wanted to keep it and swap it back out for the original stereo, you would have to mention that in the purchase agreement. The same goes for any other fixture or appurtenance on the vehicle. If it isn't removed before the papers are signed, or mentioned in those papers, ownership goes with the title to the vehicle.
I'm not sure how Canadian law works, but in most U.S. states, an auto lender holds a lien, which is an encumbrance on your car title. Liens cease to exist when the debt obligation they are tied to is repaid. (Your lender will send you a letter or notice of satisfaction, but that is merely evidence of the fact that the lien has been extinguished.)
Because property law has its own mechanics, you can't just assume that the dealership can give itself arbitrary self-help rights in the contract. It's possible that the dealership has clever lawyers and set things up to allow it to lock out the car even after repayment. But it seems more likely that the dealership simply fucked up, and tried to collect a fee using a self-help remedy it was no longer entitled to use after repayment of the loan.
You cannot simply throw money at a lease provider and gain title of a vehicle.
The lease provider can impose other conditions on title transfer (e.g. early repayment fees)
If you're throwing large sums of money at them, they should probably perform some anti-money laundering checks before accepting the money.
If you're paying cash, they may justifiably not want to handle large amounts of cash.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that return of the dealer's GPS tracker (and possible payment for removal) could also be conditions on them transferring the title.
The article is unclear on whether the title was actually transferred before the disagreement over return of the tracker.
Yes, the article is abundantly clear. You're getting downvoted because your position is counter to available facts, and your logic is faulty.
He owned the car. They had no legal right to disable it. As the article says:
Quebec's Consumer Protection Bureau said it is illegal to charge fees not included in a signed contract.
The office also said a lender has to furnish a borrower with notice of 30 days before acting in such a way. Immobilizing a car could amount to a form of intimidation, which is also prohibited under consumer protection laws, they said.
Your position is essentially that illegal behavior is fine, because, well, it's not "clear" that the behavior is illegal. Despite oodles of evidence that it is.
Are you saying if you signed a contract with a clause that read something like "If you owe us money we can shut off your car after 90 days" it would be illegal for them to actually do it? That seems odd to me.
If you're making rental payments on a car like he was, the title is still with the dealer. And the dealer can do what they want with their car. You have to follow their rental agreement in full, or else.
If he had bought a car with a bank loan, title would be with him. But the bank would have a lien on the car. And the bank (not being stupid) would get a court order before repossessing the car after missed loan payments.
They can shut off THEIR car, if THEY own it, and if THEY have title.
If he owns the car, Quebec law is clear that it is ILLEGAL for them to shut off the car, NO MATTER WHAT THE CONTRACT SAYS.
And yes, ALL CAPS is necessary here, because the information you're asking for has already been explained repeatedly.
If you find yourself unable to understand simple English, it probably means you haven't been listening.
But in this particular case, they had already sold the car to the guy's family and didn't own the title any more. Yet the kill switch was still in place and they decided to use it over some random fee (which seems to have been for the kill switch itself, per the article). That's pretty obviously illegal.
The dealer, by remotely accessing the device for which they no longer had authorization, is also technically guilty of criminal hacking.
How else are you going to get the tracker back?
The way I read it, the vehicle owner didn't object to providing them access to remove the device, he objected to paying them to remove their device.
Nobody involved in writing this article seems to have consulted this particular contract, but I wouldn't find the existence of such a contract unbelievable, nor the terms particularly unreasonable.
The dealer backed down quickly over the fee, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a right to request the sum.
Why do all discussions like this on hacker news come down to debating what they legally do and do not have the right to do.
Wouldn't it be more productive to talk about whether they _should_ or _shouldn't_ have the right to do something?
Further, establishing what current law has to say about a situation, and what actually happened in the situation, is a required prerequisite to a discussion about proposed policy changes. Trying to propose changes to the law to change people's rights in situations like this without knowing what the actual details are or whether those details are already in violation or compliance with current law isn't exactly productive, especially given the base rate of inaccurate and incomplete reporting.
Phrased a bit differently, "should" and "shouldn't" aren't completely independent from a given regulatory environment, in that there's nontrivial societal benefit from people knowing what to expect. In cases where some people have decided that certain clauses in a contract are unacceptable (noncompete employment agreements in some states, for example) we've explicitly documented that. If you have opinions on regulation of contracts for auto purchases relevant to this situation, it's absolutely worth first establishing when the contract specified transfer of title, whether or not the contract mentioned the $200 removal fee, and what current law has to say about that.
Seems clear to me. What am I missing?
If they retained ownership (which is quite plausible, given the disagreement over the fees), Iny's interpretation of the law is irrelevant.
Lease providers can and will impose conditions. Like early repayment fees. Or fees for the return of GPS trackers...
More info needed to decide who has a better hand wavy interpretation of the information that is available.
In the US an auto lender is granted a lien on the vehicle's title until the lien is released, usually after the loan is fully paid. It's likely similar in Canada, but I don't know for sure.
Stinks that the woman's commute is an hour and a half, but come on there are a LOT of people who do that commute. Reducing the commute to 10 minutes is not necessity, and does not excuse throwing judgement out of the window.
The loan was only extended in the first case on the understanding that you would lose access in case of non-payment. Had they not been able to revoke access, they would not have given the loan, or would have given it at a higher rate.
Are you saying you should be able to just walk away with a car and forget your obligation to give it back?
Not from the comfort of their couch in Moscow.
This functionality should not exist.
Sure, I usually carry water and basic stuff with me in the car, whether it is around the corner from home or a 600 mile roadtrip.
But of course, the problem here is the arbitrariness of the power the sales rep wields.
Whether you actually paid them or not, they can push a button, the button can accidentally be pressed, it can be hacked etc etc.
So, this technology opens up a whole new threat vector/attack surface that I really can't control. I can keep my car in good mechanical order and drive defensively, but there's not much I can do about electronic attacks.
I think badwater does have cell service since it is so flat and touristy ;)
Actually these devices are more like remote enablers. Its programmed to disable the vehicle after your bill is due. Each time you make a payment they update the shutdown date to whenever your next payment is due. If the car is somewhere it can't receive the update then its not going to work after the due date until it returns to an area with cell coverage.
The car can't move till it moves? I spy a catch-22...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/01/16/tesla-drive...
Unlocking with the phone is a convenience, nothing but that.
I wouldn't want to put battery issues + anything that could go wrong with a phone + anything that could go wrong with a cell network between me and my car
John Oliver did a whole segment on these scummy dealerships, unloading shitty cars at massive markups deliberately (and not even hiding that they are) targeting borrowers who will probably default, so they can repo the car and resell it to some other poor person.
None of this is illegal (except in this case obviously) but it still feels like something that should be illegal, amazes me we're so poor at going after what's obviously a predatory business practice.
And frankly, all of that is forgivable; what is not is when the dealers then use these remote GPS devices to disable the vehicles, with NO GODDAMN IDEA what the vehicle is currently doing: Sure, they could tell if it was on the highway but would they actually care? And what if the person is working a night job, as many in poverty do? How do they get home?
Or what about the case awhile back of the woman who's baby was in the damn car when it was towed?
I get it, it's a business risk, but these things are DESIGNED, purposely, to fuck people out of their money and do tons of damage besides that. Exactly how much is a bank allowed to ruin someones life over a CAR LOAN?
Crap like this is why we need a Consumers Bill of Rights.
Also, unless there is data, I don't believe a company would disable a car in a manner that would be unsafe for anyone, at the least since it's a massive liability for them and there's no reason to. If anything, the GPS/car disabling would allow for lower costs for buyers since there is less risk for the lender, which would benefit the buyers who are responsible.
These "tote-the-note" lots proliferate in low-income urban areas, and often offer sub-standard cars at higher prices than the traditional used car market, and top it off with really high interest rates. Often they will sell and repo the same cars over and over, taking payments and down payments until the buyer hits a streak of bad luck or poor decision making.
On one had, the fact that these dealers do repo cars so often sorta justifies the big interest rates - after all, why would you loan money at a higher risk without a higher return? The flip side is that this tends to be very bad for society as a whole, making it insanely more expensive to be poor.
They aren't just a lot, they are a high-default finance and repo operation also. They need to pay additional insurance, monitor their cars - their rates can't be great and every car requires some version of gap insurance on their end probably at least for a while if they're rolling these costs into the sale price and then requiring no or little down payment. I assume since they're smaller operations their money has a higher time-value to them -- i.e. if a higher than normal number of people pay late one month, they may be late on their debt payments since I assume they have some type of line of credit and they themselves probably don't have the best rate.
I don't think they are specifically out to mess up people's lives is all I'm saying, it's easy to get caught up in the emotional side of a car repossession but think about if a client didn't pay you and you were racking up credit card interest waiting for them so you can pay your own bills -- would you feel bad about taking back your work after a certain period of time?
When you're selling a Kia with a KBB of $3,000 for $13,000, I'm going to assume you've adequately "factored in your costs" without resorting to gap insurance (which is going to be huge, because the insurer is going to pay fair market on KBB, not what you sold the car for) other than (further) extortion.
> they may be late on their debt payments since I assume they have some type of line of credit and they themselves probably don't have the best rate.
Hah. I had to use a subprime dealer after my divorce (not to the extent of GPS / immobilization, but 'pricy'). A year or so after buying the car, I got a call from a bank that I didn't recognize, saying that I owed them $2,000. This was the same amount that I'd written on a check for the down payment on the car. Sure, a cancelled check stub saying "Sorry, I paid the dealer the down payment" cleared it up, but something was awry.
Six months later, their multiple locations are shut and another bank has them in court for breaches of contract that I think ended up as fraud proceedings against the dealership owners for multiple financing issues (mind you, they were both still driving their Bentleys)...
I’m not sure how you parsed that from my post - I didn’t ascribe any intent or motivation to any party.
First, search for "title loan", "payday loan", and "check loan" businesses. This anchors your search areas to places where predatory lending is profitable. Then search for "car dealership" and ignore any results that have a brand name or a large lot, as those are the new car dealers. You will find the used car dealers with smaller inventories.
If you can get a street-level view of the lot, and see signage about "buy here pay here" or "no credit check", you have a winner. These types of businesses are literally everywhere, from downtown in a big city to the no-name dealer set up on the largest highway passing through a semi-rural town in the middle of nowhere. You can find them wherever poor people are to be found in North America, because having a mostly reliable personal vehicle is often the unavoidable first step to climbing out of abject, destitute, hopeless poverty into a more comfortable (but still bleak) working-class existence.
It is not entirely clear to me whether anti-usury laws would help or hurt more. Clearly, these businesses are providing a vital service to the poor. But they are also providing it in such a way that their customers are more likely to remain poor.
Put into a metaphor, imagine you have 10 flotation rings. That's all you can afford to keep in inventory, but you're going to make a business of reselling them. Now, you could check satellite maps, and go door-to-door, selling them one at a time to confirmed pool owners as a prophylactic safety device. But those people have no pressure to buy. You'll get a lower price. So instead, you can go to public aquatic recreation hot spots, with no lifeguards--that is, no one else around to compete with your service--and wait. When someone starts drowning, someone will call out to you, "Hey! You! We need that, right now!" And you will say, "Certainly. That will be $15000. Don't worry, it's payable with no money down and 120 easy monthly installments of $100, with a final balloon payment of $3000. Sign here." Faced with the choice between paying it and letting someone drown, they pay. If a buoyancy-hawker was not there, that swimmer would drown. But since you were there, you just put someone in debt-slavery to you for the next decade or so. Profit! And then when that 10 years is up, they still don't have that $3000 all at once, so you can stick them again on their way out. Profit again!
Obviously, the best solution all around would be for the parks department to provide prepaid lifeguards for everyone at fair prices. But the people who can afford to pay for that would rather swim at their private club than at a nasty river bank with a bunch of poor people. "Why don't they just learn how to swim better?" they say. "If a $50 annual pool club membership is too much, maybe they shouldn't swim at all," they say. And so the situation persists.
Looking past the fact that I already gave you one example, how would they know? The GPS device knows where the vehicle is, what it's running state is, and that's it. They don't know if the vehicle is stopped helping another person on the side of the highway. It doesn't know if the driver just ran inside to get their kid from daycare. It doesn't know if the owner is at a doctor's appointment 40 miles from home.
And more to the point, it's not as if these solved a problem. Cars were repossessed aplenty before they were invented, the only difference is it used to be expensive, so a bank would work with the borrower to attempt to salvage the loan or at the very least, have to repossess the vehicle when the borrower was at home or at work. Now it's cheap to repo the car, so why bother? Why even notify the person other than with a text message, the Lender now has no reason to even attempt it, just repo the car, get it back on the lot and sell it to the next poor bastard who's desperate for a car.
The real long term solution is good public transit, so poor people don't have to go into debt to commute.
What's next, Bernie, do you believe that car ownership is a "right"?
Some things that were previously considered rights are no longer necessary or desirable as society advances (the right to own slaves) while other things that were not previously considered rights (guaranteed access to the internet) might start to make sense as our world changes around us.
You also bring up a good point that there are currently few instances where this has occurred, but that's sort of my point, that past standards are not always applicable to the future.
Transit will ultimately become a ubiquitous utility like running water.
Also, insurance should be cheaper and running costs ditto (presumably, the bulk of autonomous vehicles will be electric)
Besides, in some markets taxis ARE the cheaper option if you don't need a car very often - when living in Norway's #2 town about a decade ago, the annual road tax, insurance, leased parking space &c added up to a cost equivalent to more than 200 4-mile taxi rides. And that is leaving depreciation and maintenance out of it...
Bart, muni, caltrain, amtrak, etc -- thos should be 100% subsidized by taxes.
We have a gas tax that is so high in california it hasnt even done anything for our roads and infra.
You hae one of the biggest companies in the world (chevron) based out of richmond, ca (one of the poorest cities in CA) paying nothing in taxes...
the basic income argument is bullshit, and politicians are freaking morons given that they cant take the freaking hammer to corps so large that due to their financial extraction from basic human living (movement) that this problem will never be solved.
capitalism is a brainwashing technique, not a basis for a human economy.
I am not saying that we should be communist - but we shouldnt complain about problems without understanding the ripple effect of so many other problems and wwhen they reasonate together, such as not taxing gas corps, but increasing "gas tax", yet not using the gas tax properly -- then having public transport agencies in corruption quagmire - the world is basically fucked.
Why do bart train drivers work 4 days a week, yet make over 125K/year for baby-sitting an automated train, then go on strike for more money when the trains are filthy and smell like piss? Why do they have the "train of the future" when not a single new train car "of the future" has a power port/USB port? (yes I looked and spoke to them about it.
Why hasnt any bart/muni operator ever been forced to go on a field-trip to some other major metropolis to see how efficient, clean, modern travel infra works?
Why are we spinning our retarded wheels on automated driving when we need to fix public transport?
Its a complicated issue - but only corruption and greed are truly preventing progress, as the corruption and greed results in us not taxing the fuck out of gas - and investing in very robust transportation systems that should be subsidized by general taxes.
How about we just say that if you make less than $50K per year, ALL transport is free -- THEN you have greater opportunity to find a job >$50K and can start paying for your rides.
A market participant who engages in a very small number of borrowing transactions over a lifetime by definition has less available information than a lending institution.
For what it's worth I have a degree in economics, and in my experience I almost invariably hear this sort of characterization of economic systems as simple and Newtonian from people who are generally unfamiliar with contemporary economic theory.
The economy is a complex adaptive system that has a penchant for reaching inefficient local maxima. Not every market clears. It's quite plausible that subprime lending is one such example, a theory that is also well contained within the general heading of "market economics".
And no credit history is almost as bad as poor credit. If you have no credit history, you should expect to overpay when financing anything.
It's easy to get a low limit store credit card ($250 limit) as someone with no credit history. It may have an annual fee. If you pay it off reliably over a year, pay the annual fee one time you will have a moderately good credit history. Then you can get another credit card with no annual fee and cancel the first one. Then keep this second one for decades, because it will show that your nearly oldest credit card account is still in good standing after many years.
Seconding this. It took me a long time to get over my German Swiss aversion to consumer debt. You are certainly penalised for doing that in America--from getting an apartment to factoring invoices at my business, many things became harder.
When you are poor, you generally can't take advantage of buying in bulk, even things like toilet paper. I save a substantial amount of money (and time) now that I can buy larger quantities of things.
Now that I have a car again, I'm able to save a tremendous amount of time which I can use towards leisure or making more money.
Having access to credit now allows me to get 1.5% cash back on all my purchases, this adds up to a fair amount of money over a year.
There's a lot more, but these are a few examples I've experienced personally.
As someone who has shared an apartment with a person with poor credit who is also a habitual liar and hides/blames others for their problems... I believe in giving people the opportunity to rebuild credit slowly, but have no problem whatsoever with limiting opportunities and charging those people more until they work to regain credibility.
To use a rather odd analogy, imagine you're playing an RPG that becomes extremely easy as you advance in the game. Enemies just dying within 10 ft. of you. That's a shitty game. Earning that one extra dollar on the margin as you climb the economic hierarchy should be more difficult, not less.
I hate this idea that people wouldn't be motivated to earn more just because it's more challenging to do so. What kind of pathetic excuse for a human thinks like that? Our society is backwards.
Legality often has nothing to do with it. It's whether or not someone is willing to fight. In the US, it's a cumbersome process to fight something like this, so businesses routinely abuse the system.
Of course this would require a true Care Bear to execute, since you could probably make a lot of money if you just left in the predatory pricing. And the problem would have never existed if decent public transport existed in the first place, which self driving cars may eventually provide some semblance of.
So why doesn't it happen? Because it's not unfair, in the sense of charging too much relative to the risk.
1. The relative risk is reduced only when your risk pool size becomes huge, and it would be difficult for a start-up charity to weather the initial storm.
2. The execution of such a charity would be non-trivial. As a dumb example, if someone wanted to make "uber for the poor", a charity that provides free ride hailing using donated time and resources donated entirely by the drivers, you would still need to build the app and run the infrastructure. Actually owning the vehicles and maintaining them only adds to the burden.
I find it hard to believe that there isn't a car stereo/alarm/electronics shop in Sherbrooke that isn't known to other shops for removing these sort of things. You'd probably have pretty good luck going to the U-pull on a Saturday AM and asking the girl at the desk to point out someone who's a regular then offer them $50 to remove the system.
Obviously those sorts of actions are slightly outside of the box for most people but if dealerships want to act scummy then the workarounds become more widely known.
Edit: Please do some googling, window shop a few models, read a few installation instruction pdfs for trackers and aftermarket alarm systems before saying they're impossible to remove.
If you can install a stereo or aftermarket alarm then you can install/remove on of these. They are not designed to be Ft. Knox. They are designed to be a deterrent for the layman.
I'd imagine there is some sort of phone-home that indicates the device is still connected, and any tampering of the device could result in heavy penalties--including forfeiting the vehicle.
If you own the vehicle, you're right, screw them.
The devices are pretty simplistic. No deep integration with the car, they just are wired inline to the ignition switch. http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-remove-a-GPS-disabler...
There is patchy cell service in many parts of Canada. People would be very angry and dealers wouldn't do this if they went on vacation for a week and their car didn't work when they came back. It's far more likely that it pings a server when it gets connectivity and takes action based on the response. A dead man's switch type system would be very hard to implement with a sufficiently low false positive rate for this type of thing.
For a vehicle you own (like in OP's story) there should be no problem.
In most jurisdictions you're somewhat free to do what you want with property you own but is under a lien (e.g. you can put a new porch on your house even if you haven't paid the loan off yet).
The installation can't be too involved because then the manufacturers would have to do more work modifying installation instructions and kits to work on more vehicles. The more involved it get the more man hours installation takes the less likely a dealership is to install these.
Anyone who's going to try to remove one of these is probably just gonna dive into the job and keep going until it's done. Making it more involved won't stop a huge number of attempted removals. A very small percent of people will even attempt removal in the first place.
These systems are subject to most of the same design considerations and trade-offs as aftermarket car alarms and padlocks. The best bang for your buck is the minimum required to keep honest people honest.
There's also probably little overlap between people skilled enough to remove one and people that would buy a car this way.
Edit: here's one of them: http://www.calamp.com/products/fleet-tracking-units/lmu-200. It does have a way to inline the obdii port, but that is likely read only for various data collection. These devices are sold to fleet owners as well. I doubt the sleazy lease operators bother hooking up that part...just the gps and ignition lockout.
You may be thinking of the factory immobilizers integrated with the key fobs. Those used to be hackable if you didn't want to pay the high dealer price for replacement keys, but they mostly aren't anymore.
https://shop.dcsbusiness.com/product/calamp-lmu-200-series/
Looks like around $100, has 4 I/O ports (which I assume you use 1 w/ a relay to prevent the starter motor from working, and not kill the vehicle while in use).
Besides, I imagine they make most of their money off people who don't realize this is an option, let alone understanding how to do it.
So why can't car companies chip all OEM spare parts, and disallow the car from operating if it's had any unauthorized repairs? Just put it into the sales contract. No more 3rd party repairs. Reduced competition. More profit for the car companies and dealers.
That is just practical reasons. There are a lot of laws about car repairs: car manufactures are required by law to make repair information available to third party repair shops. Independent car mechanics are a large enough group as well that any attempt to work around the law will result in more laws.
What the fuck.
Bad news: This is the kind of smart contract I see blockchain handling well: locking people out of cars, houses, hotel rooms, over non-payment.
ed: heh. I have touched a sore spot, apparently.
If people don't read contracts written in English, how do you expect them to read and understand a smart contract that would contain the same clauses as the original contract but coded in a language they don't understand?
If Grandson is right about the clause not appearing in the contract, of course, he'd be doubly good.
To say it less flippantly, the low-hanging fruit in blockchain-assisted contracting seems to be these automatic self-help remedies and simplifying title disputes -- which, right now require judges and police for even simple disagreements. You'll have fewer wrong denials of access, but perhaps more denials overall.