Why do they still make car alarms? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

popularmechanics.com

193 pointsapsec112515 comments

I have an older RV that people sometimes try to steal (it's usually meth heads wanting to live on it; I've taken to leaving a plaque on the dash saying that if they want a hot meal instead, just knock on my door).

The alarm is aftermarket, and silent. All it does is make the fuel pump go in reverse. (The fuel pump is also aftermarket)

It's been hilarious a couple times.

Anyone ever take you up on the offer of a hot meal?

Yeah. One time it was an older lady with her daughter. They stayed with me 3 days until they managed to sort something out with social services. I think they're in San Diego now.

They had a dog along who crapped in my living room, and they ended up cleaning my house top to bottom as an apology.

Just because someone's homeless it doesn't mean they're on drugs or stuff like that!

What a sad story.

Not that both can't be true, but was surprised at your words. I read it as a subtly sweet story. Surprising in both generosity and gratitude, hinting at still being in touch, sincerity. (But yes, agree that poverty itself is sad.)

btw you're a beautiful person, spiritplumber (been without home in the past too)

Obviously, the person helping is super nice and the people that are in that position are super nice as well. But what saddens me is that an older lady and her daughter are homeless, that should not happen in a functioning society.

I'm not rich. I can't fix the whole thing.

Are you still in touch with them, by chance?

Sporadically, yes. They're in a small apartment in San Diego. The dog is dead (old age).

Wow you are a decent human being. Color me impressed.

> The alarm is aftermarket, and silent. All it does is make the fuel pump go in reverse.

Would you mind disclosing what brand/model this alarm is? This would be great for a couple of “issues” I’ve been having.

If you aren’t comfortable saying publicly, could you send me a message with the info? And Amazon/Aliexpress/eBay link?

If it's a DC pump the alarm probably just turns on a relay that swaps the input polarity of the motor.

Yep. It comes with a relay and I wired it to another DPDT relay. It's supposed to go on the carn horn terminal instead.

I love how older vehicles have really simple wiring.

lol, right, sucks when they don't start.

Seems like a really complicated kill switch.

Exactly. Every fuel pump has a ground that you can put a switch on to kill it. No need to run it in reverse.

Except old engines with mechanical fuel pumps like the GGP has

GGP said it was an aftermarket electric fuel pump

Both; the mechanical fuel pump doesn't work so well, so the engine has issues starting, so i added an electric pump. At that point it was easy to also add a DPDT relay since I was taking the whole thing apart either way

That can end up pulling air through the fuel pump. That isn't safe or healthy for the pump.

This is the first time I've heard of intentionally running a fuel pump backwards and I wonder whether you're right. The fuel pump in modern vehicles is normally submerged in the fuel tank. My guess is that air drawn in by the pump would just make harmless bubbles; the pump would still be fully lubricated. Does anyone know for sure?

Fuel pumps on EFI motors have a supply and return. Return is significantly smaller in diameter and will probably allow the engine to barely run at all. It would probably start and shut off giving the thief the impression the car is junk instead of being disabled.

Oh, this thing was made in 1975. The motor is a mopar 440.

Not all EFI systems use a return line. Some use a PWM controlled pump, rather than a pressure relief valve, to keep the fuel rail pressure constant and so forego the return line.

You're forgetting the part where the fuel pump is a vane pump and will pump in reverse just very poorly (assuming directional rotor, which most have).

It's likely old and carbeurated. Running pump in reverse may serve to empty the carbs fuel "bowl".

Some cars can run a good while off the bowl. Enough to get a mile maybe.

Compared to losing the RV it seems like a negligible cost for what the commenter describes as “older RV”.

Sure, but there are several options that would be zero cost.

Older RVs can fairly readily be acquired at zero cost if you don't mind wasting time on title issues.

When his neighbors house burns down, the insurance company isn't going to pay out after finding this post. Not a negligible cost.

A little plastic impeller isn't going to care about a couple minutes of cavitation.

It's not some fancy high pressure vane pump.

What happens when the fuel pump goes in reverse?

Also, anyone ever take you up on the hot meal?

car doesn't get any fuel, can't go anywhere. (doesn't prevent valuables inside the car from getting nicked though)

It prevents the fuel pump in the engine from working (I had to add an electric fuel pump because the original one isn't doing very well).

Yes on the hot meal. I've been homeless and it stinks.

It amazes me that, in wealthy countries, there are significant homelessness problems due to economic displacement. I consider it an existence-proof of the idea that a free market cannot solve all problems.

I think homelessness due to other causes-- mental health for example-- are more complex but similarly demonstrate fundamental flaws in the framework of society.

Only once was I able to give a homeless person a meal... I'd just bought my lunch, driving a few blocks away I saw someone with as sign asking for $$ for food... I go cashless, so I stopped and ran my lunch over to them. It was Chipotle, so I hope I didn't do any lasting damage.

As for giving money to homeless on the street... I don't know. I don't know if it's the right thing to do, if it will be used for food/shelter etc. or something more self-destructive. I've stopped caring about that possibility. I've decided I can't not do something that might help someone simply because it also might not help. I also figure addicts have to eat too, and absent enough money to do both, they might decide not to eat.

A free market has no morals, it's up to the participants to instill some.

That is much easier to do when there is real competition and transparency. Unfortunately my only high speed ISP is Comcast and I had no idea that parts of my phone were made by slaves until just recently. Until business has less power, we cannot instill morals in a meaningful way.

I'm sitting here on my couch looking around my living room, and it occurs to me that a significant % of my belongings could have been made under labor conditions illegal within the US. It's a bit chilling to consider that.

this is tricky. Most of those workers don't have better options. Work in conditions that are illegal, or for much less pay elsewhere, and probably still illegal. Safety standards are not as high, but they get better as the companies learn from us. (Even at the least flattering look, cleaning up body parts and training a replacement takes time. Most people are better than that )

But I still avoid slave labor. The workers need to be free to leave for a better option if there is one.

I guess my point about looking around my living room was that I wouldn't know where to begin if I wanted to avoid slave labor.

I mean, I think it's safe to assume that Apple isn't the Big Bad here in terms of overseas labor practices: It seems highly likely that a very large % of technological devices around me involved either 1) child labor 2) some form of forced labor 3) unsafe labor conditions 4) starvation wages 5) 14 hour workdays 7 days a week

It goes far beyond electronics too: I just grabbed one of my kid's favorite little plush puppy: made in China. It seems reasonable to doubt the quality of the work conditions in the factory it came from, but I just don't know.

I think about something like "Organic Food" and there are at least labelling requirements for things like that. People do, with some effort, manage to eat completely organic, even if there are some problems with labelling consistency.

There's nothing equivalent for "no kid/slave labor/fair wages" etc. You could buy only things made in the US, or other countries with fair labor practices, but the supply chains for components & materials to build those things are will be opaque & frequently have roots into the labor practices you want to avoid.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try to avoid products like that: If possible for a given product? Sure, go for it. But otherwise I'm saying that is seems like a virtually impossible task to accomplish

I used to think this way, but I have since realized that it is a trap. Modern American business benefits from cheap foreign labor. This is almost exclusively labor done in conditions that no American worker would accept, for pay that would be illegally low. The transitional argument in favor of this arrangement is dishonest. It ignores the fact that many of our suppliers countries controlling entities are benefiting hugely from this exploitative arrangement, and are therefore unwilling to move towards a more just society.

I don't know the specifics but I feel like that is not the result of a free market. I believe the government gave Comcast money to build out networks they own? In a free market you'd accomplish that by starting public collectives that do that build out, and then have the property owned in public trust. User/owners are unlikely to overcharge themselves for services.

There is no free market and there can't be - it's a theoretical ideal whose actual implementation is impossible, and we can only get so close to it without starting to incur extreme humanitarian costs. But since we can speculate about the outcome of a truly free market, here's my view:

In a free market, the first entrepreneur to get a loan from the bank to build up some of the infrastructure would beat all the public collectives - they could just build up, sell at a loss until the local collective gives up, and jack up prices as most users switch to their offering. Rinse and repeat, and with every iteration it only gets easier - because wealth and power compound, much like interest in the bank.

A free market structurally favors larger companies. Unlike what some people say, government intervention is neither necessary nor sufficient to enable monopolies - all that's required is the positive feedback loop on capital. The more you have, the easier it is to get more.

Monopolies form because there is no upper bound to how big a company can grow. Eventually it will be as big enough to serve the entire market.

In a free market you can still have the government as a market participant of last resort. You don't have to mess with the market itself. If only one company is needed to serve the entire market there is no reason for the government to not own a large share in it and steer it. The threat of government control should be a good incentive for companies to not grow too large relative to their competitors.

What you suggested is definitively a good idea and closer to the spirit of the free market.

But lets take a closer look at the Comcast subsidy. Why is that not a solution based on the free market? It's because there is no reason for Comcast to actually provide the value it promised. It's a monopoly and if there must be a monopoly then it should be in control of the government. Did the government become an investor in Comcast and receive voting shares to steer the company on the right path? No? You just donated money to the owners of that business. Don't expect anything in return.

Actually, a market instills morals - although not the ones I'd like:

* Never give, only sell.

* Produce in accordance to the interests of those with money, not people in general or those with need.

* Everything, and perhaps every one, can be bought for the right price.

* Debt must be repaid.

etc.

they are Homeless by choice. my cousin was one.

there are Homeless by choice

FTFY

And on r/homeless I learned the wonderful expression "I didn't choose the choice."

Many people who are "homeless by choice" are making choices like "Do I keep living with my abusive spouse/relative or do I go sleep in my car?"

In most cases, if they had a better option than homelessness, they would be all over it in a heartbeat. They just don't happen to have that and have chosen homelessness as the lesser evil in comparison to some other major problem.

Edit:

Something I wrote, if anyone wants to read up more:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/when-family...

Speaking as someone who has closely known struggling and recovering addicts, that's a callous and haughty simplification. Don't let addicts drag you down, but to judge them as if they simply choose worse than other people is radically unkind to a fellow human who is struggling.

It is a throwback to the Prosperity Gospel and, before that, the Protestant concept of predestination-- unfortunately prevalent ideas in the early settlers & founders of the US. Basically it says that God favors the faithful & devout with prosperity. Therefore prosperity is a sign of God's favor, and anyone who is not prosperous is therefore immoral/bad/lesser etc. Such things are more complicated than a simple analysis, but it's one of the root causes behind the idea that "poor people are poor by choice"

Perhaps more perniciously, since this doctrine says that the prosperous are those blessed by God, then becoming prosperous is the main goal: the means by which that happens are irrelevant. Cheat/Lie/Con etc., but become prosperous? It must be okay, because the prosperous are blessed by God.

That is a loaded claim. Perhaps you could provide a more detailed support for it besides an anecdotal data point. Along with details of your cousin's situation to better classify his status (i.e., if your cousin was couch surfing for a while, or living on the street, or in a shelter, or in a car, etc)

Yes for sure. My cousin and moved to chicago into a $1000/per month rental unit in west chicago. I found a minimum wage job as a gas station clerk, my cousin refused to get a job and preferred being a vagrant, I had to kick him out since I couldn't afford to pay the full rent without a roomate and I had maxed out the one credit card I had. He bounced around from place to place tricking family and friends into believing he is working on finding job. One of my family contacts even got him a job at subway in suburbs of chicago but he refused to work there for more than a week. He eventually ended up on the streets. I am not quite sure if he could've used an govt assistance since he didn't have a legal status in the country. I eventually found a better paying job at a hospital picking up soiled laundry but I lost touch with my cousin, he didn't have a cell phone back then.

> It was Chipotle, so I hope I didn't do any lasting damage.

You are killing me, too funny! I also have given money to people, not knowing how they would use it. I figure if there is a chance it will do them good, who am I to say how they use the gift

I too appreciate the humor. That said, homelessness often means limited or no restroom access. I’ve had someone turn down food on the basis that it would cause them GI distress. What an awful balancing act.

This is only my American perspective and wouldn't pertain to all wealthy countries, but I don't think it would be fair to categorize the US as having a free market. We have a market that has been increasingly weaponized to continue the old traditions of Jim Crow and segregation. Lots of people will ask "WTF happened in 1971?" ( https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ ), but I find it impossible to do that without considering its implications around the Fair Housing Act of 1968 or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Modern America uses the economy to make the population segregate itself.

You can however go back in our history to times with lesser and lesser regulation of markets-- 100 years ago, 150... And you'll still see similar problems.

There have always been crazy people and the indolent, but there was a qualitative change in the number of urban homeless in the 1980s. It didn’t used to be like this.

Isn't this usually attributed to the Reagan administration's repeal of Mental Health Systems Act? Not that the situtation was necessarily all that great before it was repealed, but my understanding is that the federal government making this change ended up putting a lot of people on the street.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

Yeah they did, we have had similar problems in Australia

The thing is, it's still a lot better than the mid-century horror stories of institutions; electrotherapy, lobotomy, people being drugged into a permanent fugue state, sexual abuse, etc. Those concerns are what drove these changes to the system.

The Carter Administration had funded a transition to community-based outpatient mental health. Then the Reagan administration proceeded to pull the rug out by repealing the MHSA and leaving it to the states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

> The thing is, it's still a lot better than the mid-century horror stories of institutions; electrotherapy, lobotomy

ECT[1] (Electroshock Therapy) has an extremely bad rap (One Flew over the Cukoo's Nest didn't help), but there's quite an important use for it in modern psychiatry.

Notably severe depression, where normal meds don't help, or where there's an urgency to do something immediately (psychiatric meds usually take a few weeks to work and finding the right medication and dosage can be very difficult) ECT may be the last viable option for a patient.

Nowadays an anesthetic is applied before the treatment and (except in very rare cases) informed consent by the patient is required.

There's no doubt that it was massively abused in the past (and let's not even get started on lobotomy) and I'm pretty sure it's still abused in countries run by totalitarian regimes.

But it can be really the last hope for a patient with severe depression, despite the fact that it still has a very bad image.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy

E: clarifications

There was also a few court cases in the 70s and 80s that made it very difficult to involuntarily commit someone to a mental institution. Some of them are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addington_v._Texas

If a mentally ill person doesn’t want to stay in a mental institution, authorities basically have to wait until they cause significant harm to be classified as dangerous before being able to do anything.

The qualitative change in the 1980's was a deep recession that saw a drastic reduction in HUD funding, combined with a 20-30 year long defunding of long-term mental health institutions. The combination left the economically disenfranchised and mentally vulnerable with high rates of homelessness.

It's notable that neither of these factors that had been keeping homelessness rates low were the result of a hands-off free market, but instead the product of social safety nets that, when removed, simply didn't catch people.

I'm not sure if it's deliberate on your part, but there are also more categories to homelessness than crazy and indolent. A significant portion simply "fall on hard times". Take this article [0] about the causes of homelessness in Seattle. Between eviction & loss of job, about 35% of homeless are find themselves there through economic issues. The other causes are worth reviewing as well. Crazy & Lazy simply don't cover it.

[0]https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/why-are-p...

The “fall on hard times” crowd hasn’t always lost their homes. For instance, it doesn’t matter how bad the famine was in feudal times, the lord wasn’t going to kick you off the land. Losing your home to foreclosure requires a modern economy.

That isn't quite true. It was not uncommon for the British lords to kick Irish off their lands. I have a hard time believing that was a unique circumstance throughout the history of various forms of feudalism.

See also the practice of "Enclosure" for an additional example.

In addition, being a peasant often had some properties of slavery: no freedom of mobility or choice and sometimes lack of pay, with the express approval of the local lord required for many things. See the Revolt of 1381.

The Lord-Peasant relationship is really not a positive example of preventing homelessness, but either way, let's face it: It was the Government supporting those people. Arguing from the historic example of feudalism as a method that prevented homelessness would mean you're arguing that the government should be directly supporting the homeless.

1. “Enclosure” is the defining act of modernization, so it doesn’t really say anything about feudal times.

2. I’m not arguing that feudalism was good. I’m arguing that homelessness is a historically embedded phenomenon, and was essentially non-existent in pre-modern times and then it became markedly more prevalent in the last 40 years. I’m not sure about all the causes of or solutions to homelessness, but I do think if it were the priority, homelessness could be resolved at the price of imposing some other trade off problems (which might be worse on net).

I just realized the other day that the major arteries inbound to DC from northern Virginia seem to correlate with social classes. Guess which ones have tolls?

Toll roads are like fancy restaurants. You're paying for who isn't there.

The microprocessor became available in 1971, that's what happened.

Why would you need evidence to refute the idea that 'a free market can solve all problems' That would be an insane thing to assume in the 1st place. Where would you even get that notion from?

I know many people who hold onto the idea of free market like it's a religion. They call their religion libertarianism (I don't know if this is accurate of libertarian thought leaders)

I do have to refute that idea. I'm not sure how much their opinions matter and if my time is well spent trying to change them, but they're in my life so I collect the evidence.

To a first approximation, zero Libertarians believe that "the free market can solve all problems." Many of us do believe that - on balance - free markets deliver better outcomes than other approaches, but that is not a claim of perfection. Other Libertarians believe that free market approaches are simply morally superior, since any non-free-market approach seems to necessitate the use of force/violence to prevent people from simply trading freely as they would in the absence of said force/violence.

And, of course, some Libertarians hold both beliefs - that free markets are the moral approach AND that the create better outcomes more often than not. But other than maybe a few n00bs who just discovered Libertarianism from a pamphlet or something, almost nobody is going around claiming that free markets fix everything.

Since no purely free market system has every existed at the scale of a nation in human history and therefore no coercion free one either at what point does it become acceptable to arrange your society around coercive arrangements.

If you construe some tipping point like for example chance of existential or utilitarian failure that does justify coercion how do you differentiate between a society in which minimizing coercion is the goal and one in which whatever you construe as justifying coercion is actually the guiding principal.

High school econ class, for one

Because there's a certain subset here on HN that believe just about any problem could be solved if only the free market was allowed to operate without restriction or government intervention. I have on occasion run into them like running into a brick wall.

It's the opposite. You don't need to regulate the free market itself. You have to properly regulate society itself so that the free market can actually align incentives with desired results.

Government intervention can be fully compatible with the free market if the government acts as a market participant.

As others have said the USA is far from a free market. Instead the wealthy use the state to manipulate markets for their benefit, and the rest of us suffer as a result.

I've come to see "free markets" as the economic fabric on top of which we can build structures to support one another. For example we could form large healthcare collectives in a free market, as an alternative to state controlled health care (or insurance companies). I think a big factor is collective control versus minority control of the institutions that provide services like that.

As far as what a person without housing will do with the money - I'd rather offer the help than assume they don't know whats best for them. Even if they use it for drugs or alcohol as is often the source of much hand-wringing - then maybe it will help them get through the day. Of course, giving money to shelters is a good use of money too. And food banks.

> As others have said the USA is far from a free market. Instead the wealthy use the state to manipulate markets for their benefit, and the rest of us suffer as a result.

Some might still call that a free market.

Well it’s not the libertarian conception of a free market. I’m not that kind of libertarian but as I learn more about their theory, a major complaint is that right now the wealthy use their money to influence the state to influence markets. The libertarians theorists would prefer the wealthy use their wealth to compete in the market, not use the state to force things to the benefit of one firm. That’s why they want a weaker state. So it can’t be influenced by the wealthy.

However lots of people misunderstand that theory and think the wealthy influencing the state is what libertarians want. I’ve not found any libertarian theoretician who advocates for that.

There are more make believe libertarians than there are libertarian theorists and they like virtually everyone else want the board tilted to benefit them. The people that are most likely not to want the board tilted are however those who already substantially benefited by the current state of affairs.

It's trivial to forget that their isn't much in the way of ground truth underneath society what people think of as the government not meddling much with society actually usually means leaving alone the current result of centuries of meddling if if the current distribution of tokens and things were the result of natural law and any change or redistribution is the only coercive act. If you imagine a board with certain positions privileged above others and spaces pre parceled out to certain players all the existing restrictions on players movements and actions are all coercive its just coercive in the ways that is presently expected as normal.

I mostly agree with you. Most people, whatever theory they subscribe to, are bad at their theory. There are a lot of Christians who aren’t good Christians. Lots of Republicans in favor of big government if the project is military in nature. Lots of liberals claim to care about people of color but still advocate for policies that harm minority groups. Most people simply have muddy politics because they’re more focused on other things. I don’t think it makes certain underlying theories bad just because lots of people claim them but don’t practice them. Christianity is full of great loving ideas, republicanism makes sense in a lot of ways, etc.

But I disagree that getting the government out of the way means leaving existing power structures intact. What I have learned from libertarian theory is that a whole lot of existing power structures exist (in the USA where I live) specifically because someone bribed the government in to supporting something they wanted. Take Disney continually extending copyright laws for example. Instead of getting old media in the public domain we get ever more restrictive copyright law because some corporations found it worth fighting for. Removing government in that instance would reduce existing power imbalances. So called “right to repair” laws for example provide a balance to the powers granted by government to corporations that would lock customers out of repairing their own equipment. I’ve also heard a few credible stories of instances where big corporations advocate for regulation that ends up squashing competition. Of course some kind of regulation whether from the state or by other means is necessary to avoid pollution, waste, abuse, etc.

In essence I am saying that even though there are many who call themselves libertarians who simply don’t understand the theory or advocate for its actual practice, this does not mean that libertarian theory is itself bad. I think instead that certain aspects of libertarian theory appeal to people who maybe just don’t want to pay taxes but never really learn or care about the theory behind the idea.

Exactly! Offering to buy food rather than give the money they’ve asked for is just the worst kind of paternalism.

I've brought over a bagged lunch to a homeless person specifically asking for food, only to be roundly rejected without comment or inquiry. Guy begged for food daily.

I've given money to a homeless person asking for money for a cab to the hospital. They had a visibly and badly injured hand. After I gave them the money they stopped me from calling a cab from my phone, and (upon perceiving me as having left), pocketed the cash and laughed. They never went anywhere and just hung out.

I've had a friend offer a stack of jeans to a homeless person asking for pants, only to have them tossed all over the ground right in front of my friend. They only took their favorite pair.

I've taken someone desperate for food into a convenience store to pick out a meal, only to be run out by the store owner.

This makes it all the sweeter when, despite the insults, scammers, and jerks, you manage to actually help someone. Learn to see through the initial presentation.

> I've brought over a bagged lunch to a homeless person specifically asking for food, only to be roundly rejected without comment or inquiry. Guy begged for food daily.

I imagine that this isn't the norm, though.

> I've given money to a homeless person asking for money for a cab to the hospital. They had a visibly and badly injured hand. After I gave them the money they stopped me from calling a cab from my phone, and (upon perceiving me as having left), pocketed the cash and laughed. They never went anywhere and just hung out.

How much do hospitals cost where you live? I'm not saying that this person wasn't an asshole, but for many people, they see no point going to the hospital if it's going to leave them in the red.

> I've had a friend offer a stack of jeans to a homeless person asking for pants, only to have them tossed all over the ground right in front of my friend. They only took their favorite pair.

What were they going to do with the others? Where do you think they could store them in a place they wouldn't get mouldy, wet, damaged, etc.?

> I've taken someone desperate for food into a convenience store to pick out a meal, only to be run out by the store owner.

Why is this the fault of the homeless person?

> How much do hospitals cost where you live? I'm not saying that this person wasn't an asshole, but for many people, they see no point going to the hospital if it's going to leave them in the red.

This happens even in countries with universal healthcare - the "needing money for a cab to get to the hospital" is a well known scam; the dedicated ones learn how to keep a wound open and bleeding constantly. (There was a notorious one near where I live, who managed to keep a bone exposed, allegedly - never seen him, so can't comment further on that).

In London, at least, my understanding is that most homelessness is a mental health issue; support is available, but not necessarily wanted.

> support is available

In most places in the UK, mental health support takes about 3 years to put you through the waiting list (Niche problems like for example trans healthcare are even worse, with the current estimated waiting list from approaching a doctor to receiving medical treatment from a GIC being 7+ years in some places of England), and I've know people who have had trouble with being dropped off the list when being transferred from the youth mental health support to the adult mental health support. Also, it still relies on you being in a fiscally and materially stable position where you can address these problems safely and from a place where you are not literally worrying about your ability to live to tomorrow, which for a lot of people who do not have active housing, is not viable.

> from approaching a doctor to receiving medical treatment from a GIC being 7+ years

Ah, I can't believe I managed to put this down wrong.

There are two required appointments from a GIC: First a psychiatric assessment from a therapist, Second an appointment with an endocrinologist. The timeline until the first appointment is approximately 3 - 7 years, and then you need to wait up to 2 years (At least, I've heard word of people waiting that long) for the endocrinology appointment, and then finally, you will receive treatment.

> I imagine that this isn't the norm, though.

Agree. This is an anecdote to frame my point, not a statistical claim.

> How much do hospitals cost where you live?

Unjustifiably, prohibitively expensive. They were asking for money specifically to go to the hospital.

> What were they going to do with the others?

Not immediately tossing the clothes into the dirt in front of my friend, for one. My friend spent time sorting and folding the clothes before coming back outside to the homeless man waiting on the porch. My point is this doesn't really change the ethics.

> Why is this the fault of the homeless person? It isn't, and I did not intend to have my post interpreted in this way.

All that is beside my point presented at the end of my post, which was elided from your response.

Let me restate my position. If I give a dollar to a homeless person, they may blow it on destructive behavior. Or maybe they led me to falsely believe they needed the help. Point is, that does not excuse not helping at all.

I give out any singles I have. I don't care if it goes to drugs/alcohol. withdrawal from some can be deadly, others torture.

The homeless population here in Denver is scary.

> I give out any singles I have.

How much Kraft cheese do you keep on hand?

lol. provolone only my friend

Literally nobody says that free markets solve all problems. Also, nothing does. Lastly, homelessness is WAAAAAY more complicated than markets simply having failed these people. It's also way more complicated than saying that our social safety nets lack the resources to help these people.

Heh, you should look into Libertarianism.

> I consider it an existence-proof of the idea that a free market cannot solve all problems.

Free market capitalism and social welfare are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Yeah the preoccupation with “how will the person use this money” I’ve done away with. I donate money to people. If it’s a scam or they use it for “unhealthy” ends, then I consider that is on them, not me. I gave the money with good intentions. I’m not tied to the outcome.

Assuming your donations are limited, a dollar given to a junkie or a scammer is a dollar not given to a hungry man.

99% of the time I've heard this argument, that dollar ends up going to neither.

Instead of trying to decide who is worthy of your dollar, perhaps consider what that dollar is worth to you vs. what it is worth to them.

If you give them a dollar and it's spent on something you don't approve of or you think they are not deserving that on them. If you don't give them anything because you assume they might not be worthy, that's on you.

A post on HN is an educational comment not passed on to an underprivileged child. A dollar spent a moderately expensive restaurant is a dollar not spent on rice and beans, with the surplus donated to charity.

If good deeds (or even neutral deeds) are scrutinized and discouraged, there will be no end of other, theoretical good deeds that might have been done, and no simple good deed will be done.

Well if one doesn't care if their donations are used for good purposes they can as well send them to me.

How do you determine which of the three men you pass on the street is a scammer, junkie, or hungry man? Maybe you give to a food pantry instead-- what about the people that use them for the free food but don't really need it?

How do you define scammer? If a person is homeless, but holds up a gas can with a sign that says "ran out of gas please help!" then they're lying about why they need the money, but they aren't scamming in terms of not actually being homeless.

What about junkies too-- they still need to eat. Absent enough money to do both, they might choose just to get high, deteriorate more, have even less chance of recovery.

There's no easy litmus test here. No easy way to ensure the money you give is going to be used in the best possible way to improve someone's life.

Scammers have better things going than sitting on street-corners begging for pocket change.

As for junkies - homeless junkies get hungry too.

Yes, in a way that's pretty selfish of you (and reflects typical western society). You want to feel good by patting yourself on the back saying "oh well, I did donate", and then expressing interest in any consequences later on caused by the transaction. We all do it, but we also know good intentions can be lined with consequences that you are partially responsible for.

Sorry, pal, with the exception of mentioning my 'rule' for this discussed case, as I think it's important, I don't discuss my donations with anyone, except occasionally my son (to try to push him to behaving with more empathy -- something teenagers are short on)

So I reject your ad hominem attack. Your vein of typical sharp-tongued HN cynicism is very tedious.

Moreover, your remark has the arrogance of assuming all consequences of action are knowable. They are not, but you will need to learn that yourself.

I don't think it's arrogant of him to legitimately criticize you.

Why even reply to the thread if you're going to be so stubborn on your position?

Its actually an actually of having a healthy perspective on your obligations and others rights. Taking upon yourself the impossible obligation of knowing all possible ends puts you in a position to put upon them an unreasonable demand insofar as insisting that someone tell you how they plan to spend that buck.

Even if they are going to spend it on drugs they wont tell you so you are forcing them to degrade themselves either way by lying or by proving they aren't going to spend it on drugs.

Just say no if you think they are going to blow it on drugs or say yes without pretending their drug habit is the result of you giving a buck on a particular corner.

There is nothing you can do in life-- including the choice of doing nothing-- that doesn't have the potential for negative consequences.

I asked a panhandler what meal to order for him from the restaurant where he was begging. He ate one bite, asked me again for cash, and threw it away.

Begging on the streets is unsafe for the homeless and for the public - giving that way promotes the activity. It's generally much better to give to public service organizations that can coordinate broader care.

That said, if you feel you should give to someone, do it.

(And I don't think anyone with even introductory economics knowledge thinks free markets solve everything.)

Of the basic needs for a person to live non-homelessly in western countries, food is probably the cheapest and easiest to come by from charity sources after water. But people unfamiliar with the life find it easiest to think about food, and if a panhandler mentions food it's often an advertising strategy. For acquiring money for living, there's a parallel to selling your services as a software developer, solving stupid programming games in the interview, even though 90% of your time is spent on things other than writing code :)

To be generous to that person - it may have been that they were begging for money too eat - but to eat at a time and place of their choosing.

Of course free markets cannot solve all problems. And neither can socialism or communism or any -ism. A lot of pain would be avoided if people just minded their own problems and their immediate environment's. Alas, never the case

Chipotle! You animal!

You're awesome. I wish people like you were more prevalent in society.

General advice: do not give money to the homeless, just give them food. There are of course exceptions in life like with anything, but if your city has a homelessness problem then you and others will only gradually make it worse by giving money.

Have you ever gotten free money in your life?

Was your housing status critical in that decision?

As someone who's been homeless (and didn't have a drink or drug problem thanks) please fuck off. A night in a shelter costs money. Clothes which regularly get stolen cost money. Going to the bathroom costs money. Having a shower costs money. Travel to find jobs costs money. Medication costs money. Toothpaste costs money.

I presume you guys are in the US. In Europe, at least the parts where I live(d), most homeless indeed have drugs problems. There are social places where they can sleep, get clean, they help them with first steps of integration back, but its often tied to being clean from drugs. Many choose not to accept this.

Then for those who reject there is free drug dispensary & usage place, we talk about proper opiates like heroin, not some weak substitutes.

In our situation and location, the money isn't a solution for a beggar. Meal can be, ideally hot in the cold. Also, since we talk about Switzerland, people come from rest of Europe seasonally to beg and then go home to live off social services. Again, no reason to give money.

Nope I'm from the UK but we have a system that is closer to the American then the Swiss. There are services out there but they're incredibly poorly funded.

No doubt it's underfunded, but it's one of those things that will always be seen as underfunded due to the prevalent victim-mentality these days.

If you want to change the way people see this problem, telling them to fuck off is probably not the best way of doing it.

No, because beggars can't be choosers right? And the best thing to do to a person when they are at their absolute worst is to take away their last scrap of autonomy. I'm sorry, in future I will humbly accept the advice of the self righteous with a doff of my cap and a mumbled thank you.

> I'm sorry, in future I will humbly accept the advice of the self righteous with a doff of my cap

They are not the only two options. Parent just suggested sharing your perspective without the aggressive tone and expletives.

Which direct access shelters in the UK cost money?

The ones that aren't full.

There's a thriving black economy of squats where you can pay a couple of pounds to share a room with 40 other people. Totally illegal, but given the choice between sleeping in the snow or in an unregistered shelter, I'd take the latter.

I just want to counter the hate you're getting here a bit. "Fuck off" is an entirely appropriate response to someone recommending that people not give an amount of money they're not going to notice to someone to whom it could be life changing.

The "but they might spend it on drugs" argument is just an easy get out from giving some money to people who need it. Funny how no one ever argues that Wall Street bankers should be paid in food vouchers, despite the decades of history showing that they're going to spend their money on drugs.

Telling me bluntly to "fuck off" tells me a little bit about your personality. I'm guessing you have psychological issues that you struggle with. Be careful so you don't end up on the street again buddy.

They may be wealthy countries, but they're also capitalist countries; that mindset optimizes for profits, for return on investment, for getting the most out of a workforce for the lowest cost.

Currently, and I'm not an economist so this is an armchair thing, I think two big factors are wage vs cost of living.

Minimum wage has not kept up with inflation or cost of living.

Job security has spiraled downwards, with employers preferring temporary, part-time or 0-hour/on-call contracts, or doing away with employees entirely and having temps or contractors instead (also looking at the gig economy here).

And cost of living has skyrocketed up, it was steadily increasing in the 2000's, and after recovering from the 2008 crisis they've gone up crazily. Additional factors in that are low interest rates, meaning that on the one side mortgages have record low interest rates and on the other low risk savings accounts have no interest anymore, so people are looking to invest. Given how the prices of housing have gone up because of these factors, people see buying a house as a great investment.

Anyway, all of these factors combined mean that fewer people can afford to live in a house, there's much more of the "working poor", etc etc etc.

In capitalist countries, you blame the victims - the poor - for lazyness, lack of initiative, being stupid. The problem is neatly swept away. You're not supposed to feel pity, but contempt for the poor. If you're poor, you're supposed to be ashamed or git gud. Either way you're not concerned with the conditions others live in.

> It amazes me that, in wealthy countries, there are significant homelessness problems due to economic displacement. I consider it an existence-proof of the idea that a free market cannot solve all problems.

That's wrong. The vast majority of problems with capitalism are caused by wrong policies and abuse of power. The free market is a powerful tool that can solve a lot of problems within the context of an existing system. Obviously, USA isn't known for good policies. Lots of self destructive political ideas are floating around or are already implemented.

For some reason a certain group of people gets their blood pumping once there is government intervention of any kind. For them there is always too much government intervention. Except that is the wrong mode of thinking. Government intervention is not like a soup where adding too much salt makes things worse. It's not about the quantity, it's about quality. No intervention is just as bad because the free market is a machine with no human values, you have to give it human values to obtain the desired effects.

Now here is where the weird things start to happen. What human values did Americans encode in their political system? Let's take California as an example. Homeownership for old residents at all costs, even when it hurts others and themselves. California has an extremely weird desire for pain. You introduce property taxes and then take them back by freezing them. What purpose does that serve? The tax money is gone but the psychological effect is still there. People will refuse to sell their house or move unless they absolutely must. They are forced to stay in a small home even when their life circumstances change and they end up with more or less room than they actually need. Children stay at home because they cannot afford to rent or to buy property with current tax rates. You even built a legacy system that lets children inherit their parent's property tax status. It's absurd. None of this has anything to do with the free market. None of it. The free market doesn't tell you to grab a knife and stab yourself. The government can tell you to stab yourself but it can also stop you. Again, the problem is extremely poor leadership, not the fact that leadership exists.

Do you know what a free market solution to high housing prices is? The solution is to respond to market signals. If housing is expensive then just build more housing. It's highly profitable to do so. It doesn't matter what housing you build as long as it meets demand. People hate on luxury apartments but what they don't understand is that luxury apartments are wealth traps. They aren't entirely meant to provide housing. The unoccupied luxury apartments act as a sink for excess capital to pour into. Imagine a Chinese millionaire trying to get $10 million out of China. He could spend that money on one very expensive luxury apartment and displace nobody or he could spend it on 10 apartments and displace 10 people and drive up rents. What's your pick? If you want housing for everyone then the solution is not to ban housing via rent control. That's just plain insane. The solution is for the government to enter the housing market and provide housing at cost or for a very small margin below <10%. Providing housing at cost is not the same thing as a subsidy because the profit margins in mature industries get closer and closer to 0%. Don't subsidize housing because it restricts the amount of government housing you can provide. The government as a market participant can cut out middlemen that want their own cut and thus allows easier access to housing. Serving a basic need like housing is very easy for the government to do. The demand is easy to predict. One unit of housing can provide for x people. We have y people.

Okay, so why does the government not just build more housing and let private companies build more housing? Because pain. You cannot maximize pain if you avoid harming yourself. People consider housing an investment which is just plain wrong. I'm in a 50 year old apartment and the building codes back then were just bad when it comes to electrical wiring. Why does anyone want to stay in old housing? Because it is cheap? Fine, except that goes against the idea of housing being an investment. Why would you invest into something that is losing its utility over time? If you invest into housing because of scarcity aren't you just going to create even more scarcity to further improve the value of your home? Scarce housing? Why should that even exist? Oh right. It's because commercial real estate is the only thing that actually brings in tax money. So SF has lots of commercial construction and the commutes grow longer and longer.

When you consider that there is a national shift from low skilled work to high skilled work in the US this is absolutely disgusting. People have the skills to work at a good job, but they are prevented to do so by the selfish desire of a few individuals. When times are bad and people's hometown declines they are forced to move and for a lot of them their best bet is the bay area or the rest of California. All the new good jobs are in California. When you put a brake on success in urban centers you just end up with even more pain in rural places. Everyone cries gentrification when things are good but when things are truly bad nobody gives a crap except that angry billionaire with blonde hair who got his twitter account banned.

> I think homelessness due to other causes-- mental health for example-

While this is not a uniquely USA thing, it is much worse in the USA: Your search terms are "Reagan mental hospital homeless" (although President Reagan doesn't actually personally carry all the blame for this)

https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_leg...

> It amazes me that, in wealthy countries, there are significant homelessness problems due to economic displacement

I was shocked and disgusted to learn that my country of birth, The Netherlands, which is the 6th most prosperous country in the world[1], has this concept of "economic homelessness". This means that an individual or family has work and steady income, but are unable to afford rent due to a combination of politically created circumstances: lack of affordable housing, liberalisation of previously rent-controlled/social housing, and private rents running wild.

This isn't just for minimum wage workers, many people at the lower end of the middle class are either unable to afford current rent, or rent takes up the vast majority of income.

[1] https://www.prosperity.com/rankings?pinned=NLD&filter= [2] https://vng.nl/artikelen/economisch-daklozen-vallen-tussen-w... (in Dutch)

Why not just have the alarm cut the power to the ignition or something less damaging than reversing the fuel pump?

I guess because the car would appear to be non-functional rather than deliberately disabled, i.e. the engine would choke and splutter but would not take you far.

Also, in some jurisdictions the car is not considered "stolen" until it has physically moved.

If the engine can move the vehicle just a centimeter before stalling under the load, then the vehicle is stolen for legal purposes and that has effects on reporting to the police, insurance for broken windows or valuables missing, and even crime statistics if the OP is thinking long term. It also might enable the OP to file a complaint with his HOA, who may be responsible for ensuring that the parking lot is better protected.

> Also, in some jurisdictions the car is not considered "stolen" until it has physically moved.

Leading to the hilarious situation that a thief who couldn't get my car moving was charged, not with theft, but criminal trespass.

Why not just live in a place where you don't have to assume that meth heads are going to try to steal your possessions?

"Let them eat cake"

Maybe they take the RV on the road and the routes to various destinations are not entirely through safe areas.

God put a camera on this like 11' bridge

I never understood why we need a fuel pump and a fuel injector .. and a valve that opens to let fuel in the cylinder.

Fuel isn't going to move if you don't have a pressure differential.

Exhaust will go back in to the gas tank without a valve (injector).

Need to control the amount of fuel on each combustion cycle.

That's why.

Tank is in the back. The injector only works properly at elevated fuel pressure otherwise it would just drip out. Like a shower head with no pressure, it would just dribble out.

Valve lets in a mixture of air and fuel, not just fuel, and allows compression to happen. If that wasn’t the case you’d have to have a mixture injector that closes during compression and explosion. Without it, the explosion would expand in the intake runner instead of pushing down the piston.

Thanks. So does the injector get fuel on the back of the valve when it sprays?

Unless it’s direct injection, yes. It sits there for a little bit mixing up with the air. Also the hot valve vaporizes the fuel a bit more.

In direct injected engines, the injector shoots on the piston.

That's amazing. I have had my car stolen, no thanks to the alarm, and later recovered, thanks to the immobolizer kicking back in. Immobilizers are all I use now.

Haha I quickly read that as hot metal, as in bullets. Well, hot meal is better for sure. :D

Now if we could just disable the feature that causes the horn to honk when locking the vehicle with the key fob...

As someone who lives on a residential street, but with a hospital at the far end, we have tons of patients, families, doctors, and nurses that park on our street to avoid paying for the garage. I get to listen to horns honking at all hours.

A few cars (Acura comes to mind), do a bit better, in that they have a very soft, more pleasant beep instead of honking the horn. My vehicle allows me to disable the horn honking completely, but it is buried deep in the settings, and I doubt few people would ever look for it.

My car only beeps if I press lock twice.

Some people think that the honk/beep is to confirm that the car got locked and the alarm got activated. So they will press the lock button until they hear the confirmation.

It's not just "think" - some cars specifically beep in different ways depending on lock status. Recent-ish Fords beep once when locked, and beep twice quickly if a door is ajar and can't lock. It also blinks the lights to match, but the sound is much easier to recognize.

My Honda demands tribute when you close the rear tailgate. If you fail to provide the attention it demands, mainly waiting for the gate to fully close, it beeps 3 times and unlocks the car.

Very helpful feature.

Better than my Volvo that would lock the car when you closed the back hatch... even if the keys were in the ignition and the car was running.

But it is a confirmation. If you're far enough away (perhaps you forgot to lock right away), you won't hear the lock mechanism and wont know if you are too far away for the signal to reach. So you wait for a honk.

Exactly. Would you trust a computer interface that gave no indication it was responding?

That sounds like a feature looking for a problem... my car flashes the hazard lights when it locks, and I've been able to lock it every time without any problems. I just make sure I lock it when I have visibility of the car.

Light flashes twice, the mirrors fold. Visible at any distance.

The curvature of the Earth will stop you seeing the car from about 5 miles (assuming you're 6 feet tall and the lights are 2 feet above the ground.)

But are you really locking your car from 5 miles away? I doubt the radio in the key will be strong enough for that distance.

Hold my Pringles while I use the can they came in as a directional antenna.

I guess what I meant was that there are some models that will be locked by clicking only once, they won’t make any beep/honk (you can know they are locked because you can hear the locks), but if you click again then the car will make a sound to confirm it’s locked, I guess this is a feature, if you are far from the car you will know the controller signal actually reached the car. But a lot of people think pressing once locks the car and the second time is to set the alarm.

That's a configurable setting off all of the last few cars we've owned. There's no need for any beeping, honking, or anything else when the lights flash, as far as I'm concerned.

If you are handy, it shouldn’t be difficult to rewire the car to not do that or even to add a different sound source to confirm lock/unlock. Ironically, any car alarm shop could do it for you for probably not much money.

It's not just locking, but unlocking too. And even worse if you need all your doors unlocked, you have to hit the unlock twice. It's not a honk on my toyota, but it's still super annoying for everyone. I end up having to walk to the driver's side door and manually unlocking my car all the time. There isn't a key hole on any other door.

This is the price we pay for 0 feedback avenues.

Modern Toyotas, at least my wife's, let you switch between only opening the driver's seat or opening them all. It lets you disable or enable the horn too. https://toyota.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7729/~/i...

In the UK this is disabled in the ECU, as using your horn while stationary isn't allowed

> In the UK this is disabled in the ECU, as using your horn while stationary isn't allowed

Huh my car app has a 'honk' button that works when stationary, for finding it in car parks. Is that against regulation?

Technically a car park would be ok, but the regulations state:

A horn should not be sounded when stationary on a road at any time, other than at times of danger due to another vehicle on or near the road.

A horn should not be used on a moving vehicle on a restricted road (basically a road that has street lights and a 30mph limit) between the times of 11:30 pm and 7:00 am.

Some (all?) US states have similar wordings in their laws as well but I've never heard of it being enforced.

Something not being enforced does not mean there might not be a good reason to follow it. Like for being able sleep at night without car honks

Totally agree, I never use my horn for that reason.

Pretty much everything impolite you can do in a car is illegal under some statute. None of it ever gets enforced regularly because the point isn't 100% enforcement, the point is to have pretext for fishing stops and for stopping people who did something the cop didn't like.

Your car also goes above 70 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Right... but it doesn't have a specific button that can't be used for anything else but going over 70?

6th/7th gear

Hey buddy, how can I get this car out of 2nd gear?

As I proved reciently on a trip through an area where the speed limit was 75.

Entirely disallowed? I've had to use my horn while stationery for safety reasons. Like when I'm in a parking lot, I can't go anywhere because there's a car in front of me, and someone starts to back out of a parking space toward me without looking. They need to know that it's not clear, and that's what the horn is for. (It's also what their mirrors are for, but I can't control that.)

Cars in Europe don’t honk on open/close. It’s not illegal but there are some non honk areas and because of that manufactures don’t enable it.

It is illegal to honk in Denmark unless theres a dangerous situation ahead. Honk any other a time you can be fined about 130€

Another dane here: Despite this, the horn is used just as much as a fuck-you-horn as anywhere else. I doubt anyone has ever gotten a fine for it, except maybe if they had been really obnoxious with it next to a police officer.

It’s actually illegal in Washington State as well. I’m sure that’s fairly common in a lot of states and countries. But of course it’s also not enforced here.

I did not know this! I’ll have to dig through the owners manual and figure out how to turn that off.

Do you have a link to the RCW?

> It’s actually illegal in Washington State

Woah, didn't know this. It's not like it really changes anything when someone lays on their horn while passing me on my bike. But at least I can feel some righteous indignation now.

> righteous indignation

That's just the default for me while cycling.

If I recall correctly, either in my state or a state I visited, it’s technically a legal requirement to honk while overtaking a cyclist. Nobody ever does that, though, since it comes across as rude.

RCW 46.37.380 calls out alarms specifically as being allowed to use a horn, and makes no mention of how often you're allowed to use a horn outside of the highway.

I'm curious which law covers it outside of that that makes it illegal to use.

Granted, I'm sure you're right if it does exist. There are some cars with ludicrously loud exhausts around here that gleefully violate RCW 46.37.390 that are ignored by cops.

Heck, it’s a $350 fine in NYC.

If actually enforced, this would immediately close NYC’s multi-billion dollar budget shortfall.

Same in the Netherlands but costs between 90 and 370 euros depending on what you did.

How do you let people know you’re about to execute a particularly impressive road manoeuvre and they should pay attention?!? You just need to yell or?

(I have probably driven 95% of the km I’ve driven in various SE Asian countries)

I remember a case where a person was pulled over by the police for flashing his lights at oncoming traffic to warn of a speed trap.

I think his defense was that fining him for it interfered with his free speech.

I wonder if honking is a free speech issue :)

Pretty much all these laws main goal is to be a pretext for an otherwise illegal fishing stop. So pretty much all of them can be overturned if someone with deep enough pockets to prople the defense up the court system waits around long enough to find a case with a sympathetic fact pattern.

Mercedes-Benz has this feature for sure and it sucks. Usually it‘s only used by old people and dumbasses here in Germany.

I remember when cars started to honk and beep when they were locked. It happened in the 90s. I'm not sure if they were aftermarket additions done by those people that must be heard. I haven't heard cars do it for years now. None of mine have.

Nowadays the people that must be heard just have obnoxiously loud engines instead. Looking forward to that being outlawed.

Also, what is with that stupid beeping that American cars make when the door is open? You need a beep to tell you the door is open? Seriously?

The first time I exited a car of a friend in the US, I literally jumped because the honking caught me off guard.

Something else that may vary is whether a car has a delay when you lock it. I hired a car in the US once (I'm from the UK) and there was a several second delay from the time of pressing the fob to the car actually locking. Because I sometimes check that the car is locked by immediately operating the physical door handle, I was initially convinced that the locking mechanism was broken.

Thanks for your comment! I just bought an old 2001 VW Beetle that was imported from Europe, and I thought there might be something wrong with it because it didn't make any sound when I used the remote. Nice to know that this is by design.

I've never heard of this happening. It must not be a UK thing

I have a UK Jeep Renegade which beeps on lock/unlock & is not possible to disable - drives me nuts. Various websites online claim it can be disabled in menus which don’t appear for me. The one workaround appears to be putting the car in Dutch mode but the Jeep garage couldn’t do it as they were worried for the computer in other areas. If anyone knows how to work around this I’d be keen to know!

Although it's not easily discoverable, this is generally a configurable setting. It might involve a combination of pressing the lock/unlock button in the car while holding a button on your fob. Look for instructions in the manual.

Thank you for posting this! Looked into it, and on my Nissan, holding the unlock and lock buttons together for 3 seconds turned off the beep!

I had assumed that this was a 'feature' that could not be disabled, akin to 80s cars having the requirement to hold the handle up when shutting the door to keep it locked. I have a suspicion that this led to more cars being left unlocked and stolen than it saved people from locking their keys in the car.

This is no snipe at you personally, as I'm not yet all that good with it - but I'm surprised how nobody ever seems to read manuals for stuff, especially stuff they plan to use on a regular basis, and then live with problems that would never be an issue if they did read the instructions.

When I first realized this, I made a decision to always remember to RTFM, and I mean actually read it. Since then, it helped me in many ways. Some random examples:

- At one of my previous jobs, there was a proprietary source control / issue tracker / timesheeting system that the customer forced on us. Everyone absolutely hated it, considered it clunky and super confusing. One day by chance I realized there's an user manual in the Help menu, which I read end-to-end. And suddenly, I saw the system as easy to use, quite intuitive, and even somewhat likeable. Did wonders for my job satisfaction.

- My ability to use GDB went up an order of magnitude after I read the small book's worth of user manual it ships with. Ever since, I've learned to appreciate Info pages that come with GNU software, and prefer that to skimming man pages.

- When we bought our current car, my wife printed out the manual and I read that cover-to-cover too. Discovered a bunch of tiny little features we would've never thought to look for otherwise.

At this point, I consider the skill of reading a manual end-to-end to be my little superpower :). And I'm deeply disappointed when a product (be it physical or software) doesn't include a proper user's manual.

The first time I visited the USA, I was sat in a car park wondering why everyone kept honking.

Here (UK), cars are typically silent but some make a small chirp.

This drives me crazy about my Acura. I want it to honk so I know the car is locked or so I can find it in a parking lot. Instead it does a tiny muffled whimper that is functionally useless.

If the car honks or flashes its indicator lights doesn't mean the car is locked. If one door is slightly open the locks will generally unlock immediately, regardless of the sounds/lights. A more reliable way is to listen to the lock motors click once in unison but not twice. I often push the lock button and just try one door myself before leaving the car.

That's nice if your within hearing of the subtle lock sounds

> A few cars (Acura comes to mind), do a bit better, in that they have a very soft, more pleasant beep instead of honking the horn.

A bit anecdotal, but I remember that during the 90s most cars would do this with this alarm. Although thinking about it, it probably had more to do with off-the-shelf/optional alarm systems having their own loudspeaker.

2020 Toyotas have all of this configurable, you can disable the beep as well as the light flashes.

I've had a Corolla and an Elantra that had configuration to disable the noise during locking. It is usually pretty easy.

Can confirm at least a few models have had this for more than a few years.

Mine only honks if it's fully locked - i.e. all the doors are closed.

If you leave a door open and lock it it's silent, I guess to tell you it failed.

So it's not a useless feature, although it doesn't have to be an annoying honk, a quiet chime would work as well.

My Ford Transit is the other way around (UK).

It only sounds the horn if you remote lock it and a door is open, otherwise it's silent.

> A few cars (Acura comes to mind), do a bit better, in that they have a very soft, more pleasant beep instead of honking the horn

Pretty much all the European cars and luxury cars only use the horn on repeated lock button press and have a chirp for first/routine lock/unlock.

It's really the economy cars that primarily use the horn (presumably for the cost savings of not having a separate lock confirmation chirper)

I've always wondered about this trend.

If there is a feature that is "important" you get it whether it is appropriate or you want it.

Keyfobs have the beep feature (except tesla). car trunks and doors close with a beep. Flashlights get the blinky-mode feature (except blf lights).

Too bad non-touchscreen controls have not been important enough.

If the author had a Ring doorbell (and looked at their crime reports), or participated on NextDoor, they would know that theft from parked cars is the number one problem in most neighborhoods. An alarm is still a good deterrent for people who do not park their cars in a garage.

The best and only important deterrent is to not have anything to steal, especially in plain view. If everyone did this then theft from parked cars would drop to zero, and break-ins to near zero.

Smash and grabbers don't care about alarms. They'll be gone in a few seconds anyway.

Right. The alarm makes them only target the easily available junk that is in plain view. With no alarm, the thief could quietly spend 30 minutes "working on" the vehicle so they could clear out your trunk, and maybe even a few parts like the radio/GPS

No thief is going to spend 30 minutes on a suburban street rifling through a car. If it's in a secluded parking area, or behind a building, maybe. But not on a main street with neighbours and traffic.

AFAIK, people don't really steal stock radios anymore. Or at least, it's not very common.

Your trunk should also be empty of anything valuable. There's no reason to keep much back there overnight. I guess thieves could steal my tire chains and donut right now, but that hardly seems worth the trouble.

Jokes on any thief that tries to steal from my trunk. I don't really care about any of the junk in there other than maybe my jumper cables and tool set. Have fun sorting through all of the extra stuff to find them in time

Thieves stole my chains, first aid kit, and my cheap ass toolkit that I kept in the trunk. No value on any of that shit so I’m not sure why they took it. But they also left an envelope that had a piece of paper in it with scribbles in it, and a roof rack mount from a different car. Thieves aren’t always stealing things because it’s logical.

had someone smash my window and rifle through my stuff. Window was $70. I found a uncached $375 check on the passenger seat I had lost in all of the checks from work (back when you got physical checks). So... yay!

Even with an alarm... our car was stolen from our (detached) garage. If anything, the garage gave them ample cover to work in privacy, actually.

Still not sure exactly how they did it... Our vehicle has physical keys, no wireless fobs or keyless entry, so it wasn't a relay/clone attack. They basically just stripped out the ignition, and busted out all the interior lights, and did something in the fuse box (probably pulled a fuse or something to disable the alarm while they worked on the ignition cylinder). We have them on video driving away in our car... Apparently Kia really sucks at anti-theft.

We still had all keys in our possession, too. Normally, if you unlock or open the door from inside, while it's locked, the alarm goes off. The car was recovered only a few blocks away, parked in an alley, blocking someone else's garage. I got videos of the thieves walking away down the alley after ditching it.

They left actual valuables in the car/garage like tools, sunglasses, camping gear, etc... and destroyed a lot of nonsense things. The only valuable thing they took was the dash cam.

As it stands, the garage, the alarm, the steering lock, key requirement, and video recording did little to stop them. The garage was locked too, and very well lit with motion activated flood lights. I don't know what else we could have done other than have the garage secured with motion/door sensors and a very loud exterior siren/strobes... to protect our shitty 2011 Kia. lol, right...

Basically, thieves gonna thieve, and vandals gonna vandal.

https://denver.cbslocal.com/2019/12/05/denver-police-kia-the...

That long story and it didn't look like they got much out of it. At that point you start to wonder about the motive. Drugs? Plus not having a lot of intellegence or skill?

Probably needed a disposable car for a crime.

Hm. Maybe I am wrong on this, but then you would expect them to dispose it near a potentially faraway crime scene, not close to where it was stolen.

Plans can change. OP asked a question, and I provided a possibility that wasn't previously considered.

Well it kinda fits what I heard about something like meth, where someone might expend a lot of energy on a wild plan (elaborate heist of a Hyundai) but not have much to show for it (Hyundai abandoned a few blocks away with nothing of value removed).

Didn't seem like a rational actor.

Hmm, too late to edit, but it appears I mis-remembered Kia as Hyundai. I remembered the country of origin correctly though!

My friend had a thief steal her microwave in a smash and grab. She stopped to go into the gas station for nor more than a few minutes to pay for gas.

Store your stuff in the trunk. Always. We all think it won't happen to us until it does.

Unfortunately your suggestion is only a half measure and a significant number of break ins are to steal parts off the car itself.

Theft of airbags is very common as is theft of catalytic converters.

Airbag theft: https://wjla.com/news/local/the-dc-area-has-become-a-hot-spo...

Catalytic Converter theft impacting Prius owners. https://www.torquenews.com/8113/toyota-prius-owners-are-aski...

Can confirm and was going to make this exact comment.

My entire life I made sure my car was spotless and nothing of value was visible to make it a less attractive target. The one time it got smashed into was to steal the airbag. It was infuriating.

Also anything with clearance. Had one cut out of my Land Rover in Venice, took them like 3 minutes.

We checked NextDoor in the morning and it seemed like dozens had been taken that week.

I subscribe to that philosophy, too. Still, it didn't stop someone from breaking into my car anyway and throwing all the crap in my glovebox around the car and leaving trash everywhere. The police didn't even want to file a report.

Yes. The only time I've had a car broken into I had left a suit jacket on a hanger next to a rear window. Perhaps they thought the jacket might have had a wallet in it. They didn't find my emergency cache of 'petrol money' I keep in my car in case I forget or lose my wallet and need to fill up. This was a hotel car park in the UK town of Bedford.

If you do put stuff in the boot (trunk) you should do this before you park, otherwise it is a dead giveaway that you are hiding something valuable.

I don't get what people are stealing from parked cars? You can't remove radios anymore. What are they taking? Surely nobody's leaving a laptop or a purse in a car?

They will not hesitate in San Francisco to break a $300 window to steal the change out of your ashtray.

That's just a figment of local law enforcement policy and doesn't really speak to broader trends. Places like Boston and DC have car break ins but they're not rampant like in SF

Edit:

For those unaware SF downgraded a ton of (formerly felony I believe) property crime to low level misdemeanors with very light sentencing guidelines (termed "catch and release" by many) which results in nearly zero law enforcement action being taken against them . The result of this is that all sorts of petty theft and theft adjacent behavior (like breaking into cars) is far more rampant than in many other cities because (obviously).

I support treating petty property crime as petty but you can't accidentally allow "crime with a victim" type crime to go unenforced in the process. Victimizing other people can't be an activity that has positive ROI in the long term.

> That's just a figment of local law enforcement policy and doesn't really speak to broader trends.

You don't know what you're talking about.

That's California Proposition 47 [0] from 2014.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47

In San Francisco, those types of property crimes were going up before Prop 47. That is not to say 47 didn't exasperate the problem. The city also had diversion programs for non-violent crimes, both misdemeanor and felony, before the proposition was enacted. SF has had an epidemic of car break-ins for the last decade and the organized shoplifting rings have been a thing for generations.

I never experienced drug or grocery stores locking up merchandise until I was visiting a friend in SF in 2007. Then again that was also the first time I saw used condoms and needles in the gutter, a person taking a dump between two parked cars, and two men humping in the bushes of Golden Gate Park.

Can confirm.

On one occasion a homeless person smashed passenger windows on ~8 cars parked on La Playa @ Judah in front of Java Beach. My mx-5 happened to be one of them. When I confronted him about it, he claimed some passers by called him a faggot and that's why he broke all the windows. No ashtray incentive needed when you've got Crazy to make up for it.

On another occasion a homeless person reached into my mx-5 and broke the center console door's latch while I was in Safeway in San Mateo. I had left the back window zipped down with the rag top up as I was going to be quick, nothing was left visibly out. I came out of the store to see her crawling out from the back window and run away.

These happened > 7 years ago, I'm sure it's worse now.

Not that I think car alarms would have made any difference here. People commit petty crimes in broad daylight throughout SF with impunity. It's surreal. We watched a bicycle chop shop operate in broad daylight for over a month from the CoreOS office windows, SFPD drove past constantly without doing anything about it.

Edit: Just remembered my ex's mx-5 had its new rag top cut into for the contents of its center console months after she moved to the inner sunset, parking on the street around 7th and Judah. That'd be about 10 years ago. I'd just installed that top, still raises my blood pressure to think about it.

Driving an MX-5 in San Francisco...I have to ask - manual transmission? Because if not, you're not really getting the full experience; but if so, those hills must be fun. I'm thinking of some of the streets in the Marina going up to Pac Heights with stop signs.

Mine was a track-prepped turbo NA with out of state plates, recovered gearhead here. FM2 "race" intercooled turbo w/standalone ecu and alcohol injection, ohlins dfv coilovers and tubular swaybars, R1Rs on 15x9 6ULs, 12" rotors w/wilwood 4-pot calipers, torsen lsd, the list goes on.

But driving a manual in SF proper wasn't really all that interesting compared to other CA gems like PCH, 9/skyline, 36.

Surprisingly that particular car never got fucked with. The mx-5s mentioned in my comment about petty crimes were mostly stock. Dumb luck I guess...

Back when I drove a soft-top convertible I would just leave my doors unlocked. Better to lose whatever change is in the ashtray than re-cover the top.

A friend had his S2000 cut open and seats stolen 3 or 4 times in Florida, insurance company finally dropped him.

In my neighborhood, I've seen multiple reports of guns being stolen from vehicles. Anything of value should be hidden, such as dash cams, radar detectors, coins for parking meters, etc. People post videos all the time of hoodlums looking into car windows deciding whether or not it's worthwhile to break in.

Leaving your gun in your car and having it stolen sounds like a way to get framed for a murder!

This is why you report stolen guns ASAP.

If only there'd been a good guy with a gun there to stop the gun being stolen!!

Something something responsible gun owners something something if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.

Once upon a time thieves took my battery. I believe at the time they could get 5 bucks for it at a car parts store. Likewise thieves steal relatively minor parts from bikes. It was in the late 80s in South Bend.

When someone steals a car battery it's because they want a battery, not money. Often they leave their car's dead battery behind.

They aren’t always stealing things of value, they will just take whatever shit they see sitting in the car, even if it’s worthless.

I live in a city that has a serious methamphetamine problem. I live in the suburbs but near a train station. For many years there would be smashed car windows in the street multiple times per week.

The thieves would be looking for small change that people leave for parking (ie $1-2 worth of coins). Break into enough cars and they get enough for some more meth ($20-30 might be enough for a small hit). They would ignore any larger or easily traceable high value items in the vehicles (or houses for that matter), preferring items they could carry in a bag and reasonably claim were their own. The train was often used to transit quickly away, so any ill-gotten gains had to not be obvious.

We never left our cars on the street at night. Our neighbours that had no other option would simply leave the car unlocked or the window down. The cars were never stolen and the cost of replacing multiple windows or door locks per year would quickly exceed the cost of insurance (typically only one window/windscreen replacement per year via insurance would be excess free).

Economic downturns and interestingly Covid have had a huge impact on meth use here. My state has imposed a hard border with the rest of the country, so interstate drug trafficking has had a major decline. Consequently there has been an increase in cannabis use and alcohol consumption has gone way up.

I can't recall the last smashed car window in my street. So there are knock-on effects on crime as well.

Airbags are worth far more than any radio.

The thing about radios isn't true. You can remove them easily, but they are usually locked in software to that vehicle so can't easily be reused. That doesn't mean they can't...

Last year someone broke into the underground parking of my apartment building and stole the radios from a couple of new BMWs. No way was that just a random smash and grab, as to get in you need to go through the car elevator or unlock two doors (with plenty of cameras that turned out to be useless).

You wouldn't do that unless you already had a plan for reselling them.

> The thing about radios isn't true. You can remove them easily

Do you think cars still use the old ISO 7736 and ISO 10487 standards for radios? Those standard-sized oblong units where people would replace them with after-market radios? That's not the case anymore and hasn't been more than a decade or two. Car radios these days are an integral part of the cars computers and the infotainment system. They aren't removable or swappable.

If you ripped out a new BMW's computer what on earth are you going to do with that? It won't fit in or connect to any other model.

Can't even plop them into an identical model because they have to paired with the main computer with special software nowadays.

Sometimes I think people on HN hasn't interacted with a car made in the last couple of decades based on how outdated their statements on car functionality are.

I left a reply to the parent that should clear up your concerns. If recent Apple devices can be cracked, do you really think BMW have software engineers that can build something more secure?

> Car radios these days are an integral part

Typically a single car is sold with a few different models of stereos, not only for different trim levels but also different regions, e.g. SiriusFM is common in the US but doesn't exist in Europe, and the navigation is usually region specific (you can't just swap a DVD like you could 15 years ago).

> what on earth are you going to do with that?

In my country salvaged cars are imported from Western Europe and the US, fixed up and resold here. A car with a European radio/infotainment/nav system is going to sell for a lot more than a car with a (pretty useless for here) USA system. There's also people who need a replacement for whatever reason (it broke, spilled coffee on it, dog scratched it up, etc) and want something cheaper than €5000 for a replacement at a dealership.

As I hinted at, the radio software is locked to the original ECU so you can't just swap them directly, but if you know what you are doing (or more likely know someone with access to manufacturers software) it's possible.

This wasn't just a junkie stealing a radio they can sell for $20 to get a hit, it's an organised crime. I'd be very surprised if this doesn't happen in the USA too. I would have thought it would be easier to steal the whole car and take it to a chop shop than just stealing parts though.

Someone tried to steal my safety inspection sticker once.

I thought it was hilarious but also felt immense pity for the thief.

Unfortunately, people seem to be willing to break into cars for a few dollars of value to them.

Of course, people do similar when shoplifting.

Do people call the police and have the police show up if something like that happens?

Here people don't even turn their heads when an alarm goes off, and the police will show up, but far past the actual event.

Depends where you are. In Seattle they won’t even talk to you when someone hits your car and takes off and you have their license plates.

One of the many benefits of living in Beverly Hills, the police actually show up, even for petty crimes.

I am amused that you think a realistic understanding of crime statistics can be formed by reading NextDoor.

GP said they would know that theft from parked cars is the number one problem in most neighborhoods

GP isn't saying that's the only crime problem in the world, or the worst. GP is saying that this is the number one problem in neighborhoods. Based on what I'm seeing in my neighborhood (SV), this is 100% true.

People are also stealing packages, but the monetary loss in those cases is much less than the cost of replacing or repairing vehicles that have been stolen or broken into.

Petty crime has some pretty big regional variations. Statistics from SV don't apply well to some random suburb of Buffalo.

> theft from parked cars is the number one problem in most neighborhoods

You forgot to add "in the USA" (or some other country). Where I live (Japan), AFAIK, theft from cars is practically non-existent. Leaving things in your car visible is not an issue. I don't think I've ever seen a pile of glass from a car window busted the entire time I've spent here (14 yrs) where as in SF, several times, I'd walk by Dolores Park or down Folsom and see a pile of glass every 3rd car space.

Once you get used to it living without such theft it's hard not to see places that have lots of theft from car issues as more 3rd world like than 1st. And it's sad that people get so used to it they take it as normal. I used to. In California had my car broken into 5 times and even stolen once.

I've lived all over California and it pretty much never happens outside of SF. Smashed car windows and poop on sidewalks are kinda still uniquely SF things, not general California things.

Other places with rampant car theft tends to have more elegant methods of getting into cars that doesn't involve the noise of smashing a window. Like a slim jim.

You're talking about an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, which are in short supply these days.

Kicking out all the immigrants of San Francisco and keeping only the native Americans Ohlone may fix the car thefts issue indeed. Because that would be very few cars.

About ethnicities and theft, correlation does not imply causation.

Consider that crime might be higher in areas with a concentration of immigrants simply because those areas intrinsically offer good opportunities for both immigrants and criminals. Good jobs/pay for people (immigrants included) also means better stuff that criminals can steal.

Imagine it's different even within the US. In the little Australian town I grew up in, we just leave the keys in the car. Who knows when someone might need it? In the city I live in now I lock it, and have had the whole thing stolen before right out the front of my house while I was away.

Where you live theft in general is pretty much nonexistent (or at least, blue collar theft is). So I’m not sure it’s specific to cars

Draw a line between Bangor and San Diego and property crime in the US basically increases along it.

There are places in the US that are basically as safe as Japan with regard to property crime.

The only car thefts in my small city (~40k) this year were from a 14yo and a 9yo duo that were taking stuff people left running, driving a few blocks over and then going over it for anything of value.

But everyone just totally ignores car alarms, so they don't function as any sort of deterrent in practice. Thieves will still take your shit even if an alarm is going off.

When was the last time you ran outside to confront a possible theft when you heard a car alarm go off?

I didn't run outside last week, but that's because we can get a good view of the circle we live on from our front window.

We've had a number of thefts in our city, especially since the pandemic started, so we've been keeping an eye open for our fellow neighbors.

(Thefts have mostly been kids, seemingly using them for temporary transportation, joy riding, and a case earlier this year of a possible ring taking nicer vehicles. One from today: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime-and-courts/18-year-...

I believe earlier today I saw mention of them, or another stolen RAV4 going 120, likely on our beltline.)

Okay, you keep your eyes open for your neighbors - then what? Your eyes don't magically stop break-ins - you looking out the window doesn't stop people from breaking into cars, just like actual cameras don't stop them.

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Is Popular Mechanics just a SEO site?!

That was in a hidden piece of HTML at the end of the article:

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Based on that note's placement in the page, "this content" appears to refer to the newsletter signup form.

I really wish there was a way to disable the panic button on my key fob. It has a hair trigger and only requires one click to activate. I regularly trigger it by bending over with my keys in my pocket.

My last key fob had the panic button on the back which was flat, and promptly had a coin taped over it.

New fob unfortunately doesn't allow that, but it's recessed a bit more and is less likely to be hit.

Useless feature is like to disable as well.

You can always desolder it from the board...most fobs open up pretty easily.

Depending on the make, this could be something you could disable via app/ODB dongle. I use the Carista app/BT dongle and have used it to disable the panic button on my last two Toyoyas.

> this could be something you could disable via app/ODB dongle

Ol' Dirty Bastard sure knows his way around cars, I tell ya.

Even my car mechanic calls it ODB.

If you don't feel like desoldering, just fill the button depression with epoxy. It's what we did with our Scion xB. And then it would start panicking on its own, at which point we returned to the dealer and told them to take the whole damned thing out. Which they did without charge.

Mazda have a pretty good key-fob for that reason... all button are are to press and small... On my Honda I triggered it all the time...

Yep I've never accidentally activated the panic on my Mazda.

Are panic buttons a US thing? I never saw one on a fob in Europe?

I second this. What's a panic button?

A button on the keyring next to lock/unlock doors to start an alarm, generally honking and flashing the lights. Nearly ubiquitous on cars in the US, though personally I've never seen one activated for anything but a mistake.

I mean. You may never see someone use the panic button legitimately. The idea is that if someone is following you to your car, or threatening you you can hit that to garner attention and hopefully scare somebody off. That’s never happened to most people I know. Doesn’t mean it can’t be a useful tool if used properly.

Mistakes happen so often I question if it garners attention anymore.

More specifically, a North American thing. They also exist in some other markets, but generally not in Europe, as you noticed.

I have no idea if they are required by some obscure law, or if it is just tradition. Probably the latter. I don't know anyone who has ever used the panic button in a panic, but almost everyone can remember hitting it by accident.

Depends on the range, but if you're inconsiderate and can't remember where you parked...

You can hold the fob under your chin to increase its range, using your skull as a reflector.

It sounds crazy, but it works.

Can confirm.

I had one here in The Netherlands on my Volvo. I also remember setting it off accidentally many times.

If your vehicle is a Ford, you can use a program called Forscan to disable the panic button or change it to require multiple presses before triggering. While there is a paid version of the software, the free version should be able to change the panic button functionality.

Forscan? That's up there with GIMP for most unfortunate software package name.

Hey, we don't need to shame people for their interests. Whether it is Shareable image Manipulation or car alarm circumspection, everyone should be welcome in open-source software.

Take it apart and cut the trace going to that button.

I sometimes wonder about the ratio of assaults, etc. the panic button has ever curtailed to the number of loud horn blares that have awoken people, distracted people to the point where they've had an accident, etc.

It's definitely a "find your car in the giant lot" button if you ask me

You can also use the unlock in my experience. But, yeah, searching for a car is my use case generally.

I've actually wondered. Is there a super-easy "here's where I've parked my card app"? As in push a couple of buttons after you park your car and you're set? Super low friction. Not sure I've seen it.

If you have an iPhone and connect it to your car via Bluetooth (even just for music/calls — doesn't require CarPlay), then the Maps app will show "parked car" where you last parked it. Pretty slick!

My car way predates Bluetooth or at least having Bluetooth in cars :-)

Does this work in underground car parks with no GPS line of sight?

Good question. I would imagine it records the last known GPS location before you disconnected from Bluetooth. But it would be great if it did something smarter, like using accelerometer data to dead reckon the location. It could even try to use data from both your incoming trip to the underground parking spot and your exit from the parking spot to wherever you’re going. Probably too optimistic to think this is what’s happening through.

Google maps does this. Either after you complete a trip or if you tap on your current location marker. It's only as accurate as your GPS and won't help you in a park house, but pretty frictionless if you're already using Google maps to navigate.

Ah. Thanks. Not sure when they added the "Set as parking location." Exactly what I was looking for.

I had the same problem and covered the button on my fob with several layers of packing tape which has worked surprisingly well.

I’ve literally removed the panic button from my remote because of this. I got sick of accidentally pressing it.

Removal was super easy to do and reversible. When I opened the remote (like to replace the battery) it was simple to pop out the circuit board, remove the plastic button, and set it aside.

I can still stick my finger into the void and press on the membrane switch directly to activate it if I really need to, but it prevents me accidentally triggering it because something was pressing into my pocket.

Anyone with a car alarm enabled in a city is just straight up rude and inconsiderate. I can't imagine the mindset involved for someone to put a device outside someone's bedroom window that will somewhat randomly start blasting loud sounds at all hours of the night.

I'd support legislation making it illegal. Why are car alarms exempt from noise ordinances?

I think there are some laws - you're not allowed to have an alarm that wails for hours on end for example, it's gotta stop in a few minutes.

Even if it goes off for 1 second it basically ruins sleep.

You can always vote in someone who believes in basic policing

Marched in a band. We set off so many car alarms during practice.

Have also seen two cars next to each other that keep setting each other off. That was not a fun night.

Imagine this, but coming from an industrial building. During the lockdown, it seems like the office space across the street from my house lacked maintenance/security people. There were times when an alarm at the building would go off, and literally stay on for a day or more. Maybe they forgot to pay their ADT bill...

This happens to houses in my area all the time. Either the owner is on vacation, or has moved out, but it hasn't sold or the new owner hasn't moved in, and some alarm or other starts going off. Sometimes it's the annoying smoke alarm "replace the battery beep" once per minute. Sometimes it's something more annoying. I usually call the police or fire department and let them know. That's the only way I've found to make it stop.

How poorly built are the houses near you if you can hear the "replace the battery" beep from a home that is closed up while an owner is on vacation?

Where do you live? Among granite castles? Smoke alarms are loud. Sometimes I can hear one go off three houses down. American houses are not very sound proof.

The “battery down” beep isn’t usually the same as the alarm in my experience

America. There aren't sane minimums to the building code here. If you're lucky enough to be in a state ravaged by earthquakes the minimums require it to not fall over during one but still don't properly address acoustic isolation.

I live in a city and also own a converted van. The van typically has little of value inside it unless I am traveling. This van has an aftermarket alarm. I had this alarm installed after a nasty break-in in Vancouver BC which reminded me never to leave nice things in a vehicle. It makes some noise itself, but also comes with a fob and app that both also make noise. It has served me on at least one occasion where someone opened a door to nose around. I was alerted and ran outside to check on the vehicle but they had taken off. This alarm also caused someone who was walking their dog to walk over to investigate, though the potential thief took off even before they got there.

They could have taken my registration papers or the cheap / second hand cookware, stove etc. Which would have been a pain and cost not a lot, but some money to replace. I don't have room in my apartment for all of these items, so I rely on the alarm to keep my things safe. Especially when I am out of town without my van.

The article does mention valuables as a special case, but I would like to highlight this case and argue that these "valuables" are part and parcel to the function of this vehicle and that it's not practical for me to remove them, making the alarm essential to the vehicle's operation.

However, I do agree with the sentiment that most shock/vibration/etc. Sensors should not trigger an audible alarm. The only really useful trigger is a door opening. I'm not sure this is necessarily true, but is definitely true of the aftermarket alarm options on the market when I wash shopping for an alarm.

I'll also add as a final note that the police (both in Vancouver and where I live) will simply not help you recover stolen property and are 100% useless as far as property crime goes. They are either too busy or too apathetic. For items like what I have in my van it is of course not really worth their time, but I've also had a motorcycle stolen _which was driving around with my plates for over a year before it was *crashed*_. As a citizen I am definitely on my own with this stuff which is a good lesson to learn while you have insurance.

It'd be cool if the alarm turned on the stereo with a loop that says (loud enough for the thief to hear but not loud enough to be obnoxious to other people) "The owner is being notified you're in their van" (or to that effect).

This is a good idea.

I've had lots of ideas about alarms and how they could be better after that break in.

I have a fence electrifier that I'd love to get set up but I don't want to fry anything inside the van.

Another idea is something that sets off something _extremely_ loud inside, like a firework.

Sadly the off the shelf part does the job well enough that I will probably never invest much time tinkering. I've asked the vendor about public APIs but they are not interested.

If someone builds a simple car alarm kit with cell connectivity I will gleefully rip out the old system.

Car alarms should go off inside the car.

There's an effect, I forget what it's called, where a deterrent is effective enough that the only time you see it activate is accidentally. I believe this may be the case for car alarms. It has a side effect of desensitization, but it is still effective. I doubt most thieves smash and grab without consideration of alarms on the grounds that probably nobody will care about the alarm.

Thieves want to steal without being noticed. The real threat of a giant siren bringing attention to them with a towel wrapped around their hand standing next to a shattered window deters a lot of opportunistic theft. It isn't quantifiable, but it is no doubt there.

Determined thieves of course will find a way, or find less secure targets. But most theft is opportunistic.

> There's an effect, I forget what it's called

Reminds me of the "why are you dieting/exercising, you're not fat?" fallacy. Don't know the name of that either.

It's not the effect you're talking about, but it reminded me of a study that found that the value of Lojack (an early GPS-enabled car theft tracker) decreased car theft for everyone in cities where it became prevalent, since would-be car thieves were reluctant to steal any car knowing that it might have a tracker.

[1] https://www.nber.org/digest/jul97/lojack-benefits-all-car-ow...

Maybe you could take advantage of that by putting a blue LED on your dashboard or rear-view mirror that blinks every few seconds when the car is off.

Speaking of, I'm surprised that there aren't more prank automotive devices. What if your car's horn went off semi-randomly twice a month, with a different horn sound each time? Or your turn signals made loud clicking noises that everyone could hear? Or your Bluetooth calls also broadcasted through the car alarm speaker on Wednesdays? There's plenty of room for innovation in the car alarm space.

I read an article describing how some thieves will deliberately set off the alarm and then break the window. The theory is that everybody ignores car alarms and the alarm covers up the sound of breaking glass, a sound that people do not ignore.

Last time I got car insurance (a year ago?) I believe they still asked if it had an alarm, implying they still give a discount for it. Do insurance companies think it actually matters? Or do they just get kickbacks from alarm companies?

Insurance companies are in theory statistics companies. They collect data on data points to infer where cost savings can be.

Although in practice they are money making companies, and likely use statistics to find ways to upsell you.

So once upon a time car alarms were rarer, and they could charge more if you didn't have one.

I get like a 92 cent discount for having "passive restraints" (airbags), so... if you get a discount for an alarm, it's gotta be tiny.

Here they ask if you have alarm or immobilizer. They offer a discount because they work, statistically.

Over time fewer cars have audible alarms, but most have at least basic immobilizers these days. I think all the north american vehicles after late 90s early 00s have at least a basic immobilizer.

Mine still asks about "daytime running lights"

Besides what other people have said, consider also that just because they’re asking about having an alarm doesn’t mean they actually care about whether there’s an alarm directly. It just means there’s some statistical correlation between alarm presence and risk.

It could be a case of “people who add aftermarket alarms are more likely to be conscientious about not leaving their vehicle where it’s likely to be broken into in the first place” or “people who go through the expense of adding aftermarket alarms tend to do so because if multiple prior break-ins, and may be doing something (e.g., leaving things in the car) that increase the risk”.

> Car theft rates have been since declining ever since, going from about 1.6 million annual incidents in the 1990s to around 800,000 in 2014.

> Cars have gotten impossible to steal

I’m confused how he makes this claim given his own statistic. So are all car thefts done with sophisticated hacking given the RFID tech is 25 years old? Still seems like a problem to me.

Because most thefts are probably of older vehicles.

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-auto-the...

> The Honda Civic was the most frequently stolen passenger vehicle in 2017, with 45,062 thefts among all model years of this car, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). The bureau notes that most of these thefts were older models that lack the anti-theft technology of today’s models. In fact, there were 6,707 thefts of the 1998 model year Civic, but only 388 of the 2017 Civics.

But, never underestimate the sheer incompetence of car owners:

> More alarming is the finding that there were 229,339 vehicle thefts with keys or fobs left in the vehicles between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2018.

I don't know how many times I've read a nextdoor article that states: 1. the car was stolen or broken into, but, 2.) they didn't lock their 90s-era Honda.

Me and some friends went to movies, left my car behind. An old truck. We came back to finding the truck on other side of road.

After much WTF. Friends dad comes out and let us know he moved it due to street sweeper.

His same brand, but Older and different Model truck key fit mine.

Like most keys, there are only a limited number of possible combinations. There are literally thousands of cars on the road that use the exact same keys not to mention, as the tumblers get older, and you keys wear down, they become less picky about unlocking for other keys.

In university I had an old Crown Vic that somehow didn't need keys to start. You'd just grab the ignition and twist it and it would work whether or not the keys were inserted. It also had a keypad on the outside so keys weren't necessary at all.

Had a couple friends decide I'd be OK with them borrowing it for 20 mins to go grab groceries or whatever, and more than a few occassions where it was parked in a different spot than I left it.

I wonder why author think that it hard to steal modern cars. This IS a billion bucks business. Car part prices are high as never. Why not some person to buy replacements from shady market?

Because the car engine won't run without a computer, the ECU, telling the spark plugs when to fire (among other things), the ECU won't do that without establishing that some cryptographically secure element is within sniffing range, and in my experience as a computer programmer over many decades it's hard enough to get a computer to do the correct thing when it's cooperating. If it actively trying to get in your way, go around it, or under it, indeed anything other than trying to persuade it to be helpful.

FYI, for well over a decade now even plain looking keys that you put in a lock and turn have some RFID thing inside of them the car authenticates against, before it will cooperate. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32826625117.html

Still, you may have a point. It don't know what it's like in the USA, but in Australia this has lead to a corrosponding up tick in home break & enters. Since the car can't be stolen without the key by doing anything less than towing it away, they steal the keys. Regularly.

There are manual input codes on many cars for disabling those systems. Honda was worried a few years back for a big leak exposing the codes by vin where you do a sequence of brake pedal presses and turn signal switches and such to disable it so you can just pick the lock or use a cut key.

The article seems amazingly ignorant of the technique thieves are using to steal all the modern cars: key signal relay. These theft devices are as little as $50 on the black market. The article's claim that modern cars aren't being stolen is false and I'm surprised his sources didn't tell him this.

If you have your car at the mall or are in a big city parking garge, sure it doesn't do much.

If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car.

My town has a population a little over 300 people, we have one resident that is... not well... that rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter and pounds on peoples doors screaming that the government is coming (he did this Saturday to a woman who finally called the county sheriff), a few weeks ago he pulled a battery out of a forklift at a local business's dock and proceeded to smash it on security camera, rides up to people that are out and about screaming nonsense at them, etc. Then factor in "kids being kids", the people that were spotlight poaching deer from the highway - shooting in the direction of houses - a month or so ago, etc and car alarms are just one of those handful of things that actually do come in handy in some places.

Even in high school in the early 2000s I had someone break into my car in the driveway at night in a cookie-cutter edition and go through my car. With an alarm we'd have known they were doing it.

Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.

Then my mother's boyfriend passed away around the same time. Someone flat out stole his decades old beater out of the driveway at night, again an alarm would have alerted them to it. Unfortunately for the thief the brakes barely worked and they didn't get very far before plowing into another car and taking off on foot.

Car alarms definitely serve a purpose, and I don't need Popular Mechanics to justify them or not.

> If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car.

That really depends if you're close enough to the car, or in a building that makes it easy to hear noises coming from a parking lot. If I go to a mall or a big box store, I'm not going to hear my car alarm going off and other people are going to largely ignore it (since they've experienced so many false alarms in the past).

Car alarm systems should be silent and sent an alert to your phone so that you know someone is doing something to your vehicle and can check on it in a timely fashion.

Isn’t it implied that the noise not only get the attention of the owner if nearby, but also passers by which in theory might deter the criminal?

In my experience, passers by don't care. I've heard many car alarms continuously going off and everyone else just going about their business.

Passersby won’t deter the criminal. In places like the USA or Latin America where criminals are believed to possess guns, passersby wouldn’t want to risk getting shot for the sake of some stranger’s vehicle.

Even in Europe, if passersby in the big cities saw e.g. a bike thief taking an angle grinder to a bike lock, they are unlikely to intervene. It would just be asking for trouble.

Right, that’s why I mention that that is the theory. In practice it is not a great deterrent, but it will deter some none the less because it brings attention to something happening.

You can silence alerts, your phone could be dead. The point of the alarm is to alarm you at the exact moment something is happening.

Times in my life that I have seen someone racing to their car while the alarm is going off to chase off the supposed thieves:

000000

99% of car alarms from my experience are either people backing into cars, false alarms, or in my case, my truck being a POS because I had a key but not a key fob.

It’s 100% in my experience. I don’t think anyone I know would hear a car alarm and think someone is stealing a car. They would ignore it if it isn’t their alarm, cussing out the owner of the car for causing a disturbance, or cuss themselves out for accidentally hitting the button on the remote.

> Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.

Holy cow, US really is a bizzare place. With your level of wages and your low prices of gas, the value of the gas stolen was an equivalent of 2-4 hours of minimum wage labor? And yet someone went through this trouble and risked jail for it.

A comment here recently said "The US is a poor country that just happens to have a few rich people in it", and I really think it's very true.

There are literally tens of millions of people in US who are in a very desperate situation, barely surviving.

I think everywhere in the world, there are people that for whatever reasons, might not be making what we'd consider the most rational of choices.

It's really not a lot of trouble - and, presumably, the perpetrator may not be able to easily get a job for a variety of reasons - such as prior felonies, untreated mental health issues, etc - and for those same reasons, likely doesn't care too much about the fact they're risking further jail.

No disrespect in the slightest - but you're thinking into it too much, haha. Things like this are very common in the MidWest/South and such. US is quite a bit of a shithole for some, sad reality. Life is often cold and hard in general though.

I've also had something similar happen to me. When I was a university student staying at the campus dorms, I'd park my car outside my dorm building for most weekdays until I'd use it on the weekends to drive home, run errands across town, etc. Once when I came back to my car after a week of it being parked it was totally dead and reeked of gasoline - someone had snuck under my car, drilled into my gas tank, and drained the fuel into a gas can below. Getting the gas tank replaced was about USD$1,200 worth of damages and I doubt the campus police ever tracked down the person that did it.

However, the circumstances were probably different than most gas thefts. This took place during the winter in a place known for brutally cold winters, so if you're living in your car then having gas is the difference between freezing to death or not. Apparently it was not that uncommon, the campus police seemed like they were dealing with a pattern of these kinds of thefts.

I think you are way over estimating the level of prosperity of the poor throughout the US. There are people around me that live in literal garden shed shacks built with scavenged construction scraps and garbage. Go into big cities and look at how many people live on the streets.

I've owned a car in a city, a high density suburb, and a low density suburb (all USA). I had the one non-alarmed car as a teenager in the low density suburb. It was broken into in the quiet residential driveway. In the city and the high density suburb, I have only ever had false alarms.

Maybe the answer is to give the user the option to arm the alarm or not when exiting, with equal friction (i.e. separate "lock" and "lock+arm" buttons on both the door and the fob).

> rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter

That maniac!

I mean, it gets down to about -17F here in the winter. And we're pretty rural. Town is all of 0.38 square miles and he'll ride his bike for miles and miles down US 40 through farm country on the shoulder.

While screaming about the government coming for everyone and shouting random profanities.

And damaging people's property.

Definitely not normal behavior.

> I mean, it gets down to about -17F here in the winter.

Did you know that Minneapolis is considered the best bicycling city in the US?

Did you know that's largely because of all of the dedicated bicycle paths/lanes it has? That's a lot different than a rural farm town with no shoulders of note on the roads that only see snow cleared (and sees no salting of the majority of the roads) if someone in the neighborhood happens to have a plow on their truck and clears a path out to the highway for their own household.

Man, there sure is a lot of crime for a town of 300. I’ve lived in a big city for 20 years and never had anyone mess with my car.

He must live in Cabot Cove, Maine.

The bulk of the incidents weren't in this town, my wife and I have only lived here since November. The bulk of the events were in Indianapolis, IN and Greendood, IN. One year in Indy someone even stole a bunch of copper from Gleaner's Foodbank damaging the refrigeration system spoiling 464k USD in food https://www.dispatch.com/article/20070731/NEWS/307319840

Crime is everywhere, crime is random, and just about no person/business/charity is safe.

The bike guy is here in the small town, and on the town Facebook group since early November we've seen a dozen encounters with him, several of which have resulted in property damage. A car alarm is a nice thing to me with this guy pedaling around because it's quiet enough us and the neighbors would wake up to a car alarm, find it highly out of the ordinary, and start looking out windows.

Most likely thing to be stolen from my car is probably wheels, catalytic converter. Both of these require jacking up the car, shoving some bricks under it, and stripping the parts in a matter of minutes. All I need from an alarm is something that takes care of that scenario.

If someone steals it the car they have - as the article says - likely done it the easiest way: they walked in my unlocked front door and took my car keys when I wasn't looking.

Definitely one reason is this. I was surprised to hear about the catalytic converters recently, the amount of palladium in them is worth the risk. SUVs and trucks targeted because of higher clearance, Hondas and certain manufacturers have more in them than others. Battery-operated reciprocating saw (Sawzall), easy and fast enough to do it while you're in the grocery store.

My next door neighbor's catalytic converter was in the process of being stolen when the neighbor on their other side came home a few weeks ago. Luckily that scared off the would-be thieves. Needless to say, he parks his truck inside their gate now.

Depends where you live. Where I’m living it’s also the Motor Vehicle Inspection Sticker. Here every 1/2/3 years (depending on the age) you need to get your car inspected and they give you a sticker if you pass.

People steal the stickers to drive cars that either rail inspector or know it won’t pass. Last year someone broke my driver side window and manage to remove my sticker.

Do the stickers not have identifying details like the car’s plate number?

Someone needs to look closer than they actually would to check that level of detail. If you have the right color for this year you are good unless they really want to get you for something else.

In Nova Scotia, Canada ours does have an identifying detail. It has the number of the relevant inspection. It’s suppose to be applied by the garage. You as the car owner are not suppose to be able to remove and reattach it.

The other guy is right. If the colour matches and the month is good they won’t catch it unless they are being super careful. It’s not 100% but like 95%.

Even if cars had such an alarm they would just start snipping the battery before doing anything else, which then means they can also open the doors without an alarm and steal more shit like airbags, battery, ect.

I think modern car alarms would get triggered if the car got jacked up. Even on quite calm seas the alarm goes off on some cars parked on RORO ships, just from the vibrations.

Is nobody going to mention the hilarious typo in this article? "mechanics plug in to asses"

I was going to comment on it but did search first and found your comment. It is hilariously funny but more to the general theme of HN is a notable example of a typo that cannot be caught with a simple spellchecker and probably not even more complicated grammatical checker, but some kind of neural network maybe?

I was getting my car serviced at a local Toyota dealership today. While I was waiting for my car, there were two Priuses that came in with stolen/hacked off catalytic converters. A Prius with a really loud "straight pipe" exhaust is awful weird. In any case, auto theft isn't about stealing the whole car, sometimes it's just hacking off the valuable bits without even breaking in. It's not a new problem. Before catalytic converters, it was taking hood ornaments or wheels. Car alarms, at least the ones that alarm when the car is jolted or moved, are just about the only thing I can think of that can help deter this type of theft.

Many people weld a cage around the cats, or across them. Of course, the cage can be cut just like the cat, but it makes a 3 minute job turn into a 10 minute job, which may be riskier for the thief.

The current technology is to weld or rivet a specially shaped flat steel shield over the cat. It is more secure than an cage and actually improves the car's aero-dynamics.

The problem with these is that they are all made of aluminum and are easily cut through. My next door neighbor last month in fact.

I don't think car alarms are even a deterrent anymore. They go off so much. I mean I don't run to the windows when I hear one go off. Do you? Certainly the angle grinder taking off the catalytic converter makes a huge racket. The truth is these sounds are normalized in an urban environment.

As someone who's car has been broken into several times, to steal "stuff" it seems there's a market for something to prevent property theft from within a car. I don't know what it is and maybe cameras like Owl are the solution but I'd pay good money to keep my car from being broken into.

This is why I tore out my backseat and replaced it with beehives.

I'd rather see a tracking system attached to several parts of the vehicle. This would allow law enforcement to track the vehicle, and/or the parts if the vehicle is broken down and sold.

In the United States we have "LoJack" but it's not a standard feature rather a dealer upsell.

You could buy a tracker device for this purpose. Presumably it would be possible to repurpose an old smartphone to do the job.

There's also the question of who you want tracking your movements.

Tesla probably has the best solution to this so far; they have cameras around the car that record movement and send it to the cloud. A tracking system would work only until thieves figure out how to disable it; at which point it just becomes another part to sell. The Tesla solution is nice because it live streams the carjacking to the owner, enabling them to pick out details about the thief that could be useful to arresting them. Of course, Teslas also have GPS tracking on top of this.

Wait, so parked Teslas always record videos of me when I walk by?

That does not sound legal in quite a few places.

You’re in a public place, have no reasonable expectation to privacy, and the recording is not intrusive, so perfectly legal.

"quite a few places" can mean "not the US".

At least in Spain* it does not work like that, there are very stringent limitations on what you can record on the street, e.g. through dashcams or tesla sentinel mode:

https://www.aepd.es/sites/default/files/2019-09/informe-juri...

For example, you can't use dashcam recordings of an accident in trial.

* And I don't want to spend a bunch of time reading law but quite sure this is very tied in with GDPR, so I'd say that most probably in all Europe everything you record on the street is still subject to the privacy rights of whomever you record.

> you can't use dashcam recordings of an accident in trial.

Doesn't this entirely defeat the purpose of having a dashcam?

No, because an insurance claim is usually not a trial.

For most people yes, If your willing to take matters into your own hands no.

I don't think it's always part how GDPR is implemented in national laws. I believe it's admissable in court here in the UK, certainly my dashcam footage of a crash caused by a drink driver in 2019 was collected as evidence by police officers at the scene.

In Europe there are directives and regulations, and the former get transposed into local law, whereas regulations apply directly. The R in GDPR comes from regulation :)

> you can't use dashcam recordings of an accident in trial.

What's the rationale to that? Concern over manipulated videos? That would seem dumb if the video files are transferred at the accident (which happens in USA).

You can’t record people without their consent, I believe. No idea about the limitations of this for e.g. security cameras! But I’m sure for dashcams.

many places cars are stationary are not public places, and still visible to pedestrians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dos8fRzBH24

It's not legal in Germany and probably a few other countries but its perfectly legal here in the US.

So are the cameras in Teslas in Germany disabled?

It might be the ones sold in germany. You may be able to bring one in with it enabled.

https://www.dw.com/en/dashcams-in-germany-permissible-in-cou...

Looks like it has been updated for a few years.

In the USA, as long as you're not recording audio and it's not in a place where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, clandestine video surveillance is A-OK.

I don’t know why cars don’t come with built in dash cams yet. Seems like there is huge demand for it.

I think it's only a matter of time before all new cars come with front and rear facing cameras. I think the next step after that would be some sort of reporting system. Seems kinda crazy I can click a button to report somebody cheating in a video game but I can't press a button in my car to report soembody for extremely unsafe driving.

Teslas do. Just plug in a USB drive and it starts recording.

That’s a good move.

I have a Subaru with the EyeSight system for lane detection, adaptive cruise control, etc. It’s annoying that the cameras are RIGHT THERE and always on, and they even store a 22-second history that can be accessed by police or insurance in case of a crash, but I, as the vehicle owner with a vested interest in access to the feed, have no way of tapping into it and storing it for myself.

How do police or insurance access it?

Presumably, the police need a warrant unless you volunteer it. The insurance company may need to subpoena the footage from you or you may be required to turn it over as a condition of coverage (I have no idea if any company is actually doing this).

Probably, but then what? The person I'm replying to stated that they "have no way of tapping into it and storing it", and I don't think that changes suddenly if there's a court order.

Sorry, I’m not sure of the details.

My info came from the forum posts I found while explicitly looking for how to use the cameras as a dashcam a while ago. Some of them linked to the spots in the user manual that mention the 22-second loop, but the manual doesn’t have more info on how the access works. All I really know for sure is “we haven’t figure out how to get to it ourselves” and the rest is what I picked up from those threads.

Gotcha, that's frustrating. I was mostly just asking to try and brainstorm, thinking that we might be able to come up with a way for you to access it if we knew anything about how it worked and/or other parties are able to access it.

Some Citroëns do.

You can't stream video from the car to the app, not yet at least. It's rumored to be coming in a future update, but it's not here yet.

There is at least one Youtube channel, Wham Bam Teslacam [0], dedicated to publishing Tesla camera recordings of thieves, vandals, and other incidents.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbMoDtZ6Ani-eyHzCvxeVCw

This implies that Tesla can view the vicinity and location of your car at any time. Is that true? That would completely destroy any desire to own one.

This is one example of when it’s useful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SALEM/comments/l0nohv/mischievous_a...

I don't think the security benefits - while considerable - would be enough to allow a car manufacturer to surveil everywhere I go.

For the video clips, you can control whether any are sent to Tesla under the data sharing options on the in-car menu system.

Video is only recorded locally if Sentry mode is enabled (when parked) or Dashcam is enabled (when driving). Sentry mode prevents the car from going to sleep / opening the HV contactor, which costs a small amount of battery if it's enabled for long periods.

The car's location is accessible through the app, so this is sent through Tesla's servers.

> This implies that Tesla can view the vicinity and location of your car at any time. Is that true?

I don't think the cars have the bandwidth to stream it in realtime, but they do upload bits of camera and telemetry data to help train Tesla's self-driving software. The car has settings that let you opt out of this data sharing.

Regarding location data: That's true for most cars sold today and it isn't particularly new. How else would cars have turn-by-turn directions? I think it was 2011 when GM began storing GPS data from cars with OnStar. Even if you avoided owning a car with GPS, there's still the issue of automatic license plate readers. These days, the only way to guarantee that your drive won't be tracked is to steal someone else's car.

If you're like most people, you carry your phone with you. That means that Apple/Google knows where you are. Ditto for your phone company and probably quite a few other companies that have apps on your phone. And if you don't have a phone or a car, you probably walk past a bunch of cameras every day (including cameras on self-driving vehicles). These cameras will only get smarter and more numerous.

Privacy is dead. Most people just don't know it yet.

Where I live, ANPR is unlawful except for Law Enforcement, so I don't generally worry. I've never had a car whose navigation system pulled directions from the cloud - always on-board maps. I can also turn off my phone or leave it behind. All new cars sold in the EU have an eSim for eCall, but it's prohibited from sending telemetry except in the case of a crash and can be permanently disabled at the fuse box. Dash cams are regulated.

> Privacy is dead. Most people just don't know it yet.

It certainly is if you accept it.

I haven't heard that they send it to the cloud, do you have more details on it?

And for even locally - you need to buy ssd and plug it in to start recording video from sentry/dashboard.

It seems to me that the author of the article writes about something he has no idea, newer car alarms add real time tracking, silent alarms, geofencing, speed warnings, remote start and more. Some cars have those features as an option but sometimes you buy an used car and retrofitting them is impossible or costs half what you paid for the vehicle.

Which can all be defeated by the car thief carrying a $100 box that blocks all kinds of wireless signals (GPS, LoJack, 4G, etc)

90% of car thieves aren't going to invest $100 in a fuzz box. If they had $100, they'd blow it on skag and not need to steal the car.

From the comments on this post, it seems to me there's a big difference between US and EU car thieves. At least in Eastern Europe and Russia thieves are not just opportunists. They are organized gangs and they've got lots of 007-style equipment. Here the stock alarm/immobilizer in cars is considered worthless. If you want to keep having a car you either park it on secured lot, or install a good security system.

The future is probably going to involve simply having all cameras on the streets look out for the numberplate as soon as its reported missing.

I'd rather see a tracking system attached to several parts of the vehicle.

I'd rather not give law enforcement or anyone else the ability to "track" me on a whim. If it's stolen, I'll take the hit on my deductible and also keep my privacy.

If it becomes ubiquitous, is only a matter of time before it becomes mandatory. Or, the car maker sells your data and pretends that doing so helps offset the cost of making the car, the way the TV makers do.

That said, my wife's car came with a tracker. It was free when we bought the car. Around the fourth year, we got a letter in the mail stating that it would suddenly cost $40/month, and if we didn't pay, we could no longer be tracked. Sounded good to me!

> I'd rather not give law enforcement or anyone else the ability to "track" me on a whim

I assume license plate readers make that moot, especially in areas with toll roads.

Believe it or not, many countries do not have toll roads.

If you have a cell phone with active cellular service then you might as well have a tracking system on your car and derive some sort of benefit, as you're already being tracked and you already don't have your privacy.

You make assumptions about my behavior. I don't bring my phone with me unless it's truly necessary.

I'd say that's a fair assumption for the vast majority of people who drive and have mobile phones, given the ubiquity of mobile phones and the likelihood that most people will carry their phones with them at all times (myself included).

Thus, it would be your behavior which would be considered anomalous. So yes, definitely an assumption, although not an unwarranted one.

considering i'm already being tracked in every which way from my phone to my credit card usage, to my website usage, to toll roads every time i drive, etc. i wouldn't mind having this feature to save money on my insurance. to each their own, i guess

>and/or the parts if the vehicle is broken down and sold.

In the US, there's a product/service called Phantom Footprints that many dealers offer as an add-on. They affix tamper-evident stickers (the sort that leave a 'tattoo' if removed)/laser engrave a unique identifier that ties the vehicles/parts back to the owner in a database maintained by Phantom Footprints. On some vehicles, getting it installed and registering can even get you a discount on car insurance.

I'm pretty skeptical of the value of this gimmick, but my impression is that dealers get big kickbacks to push it. When I bought my car, I tried to opt-out of Phantom Footprints (as I did with every single overpriced extra), and they ended up giving it to me for free.

I don't know if that would help. There are enough independent auto repair shops out there who don't care and would provide a market for stolen parts.

Unless very many stolen cars are pinging from the same location, police are unlikely to care.

Teslas are literally the least stolen car in USA and often retrieved when they are stolen. It's partly the built-in tracking, partly the PIN to drive feature, and partly that its parts market is weak for various reasons.

The real answer: insurance companies and fleets in the early 90s.

Fleet vehicles in the 90s were high theft targets. Common keyed in most cases and sparsely tracked. As part of insurance provider crackdowns cars were required to be fitted with alarms so fleet lot security guards would be alerted to theft. Rental companies responded by demanding alarms in their fleet cars, and manufacturers complied.

In 2020 a rental car is basically a rolling eye of the god argus. Everything gets tracked.

these alarms are also used at ports of call and container shipping lots for new cars, although they're less meaningful since most new cars ship on a 'transit' mode that locks the car to 5mph until a dealer unlocks the firmware.

I think the main issue is that the alarms themselves are piece of shit. They get activated when you look at it the wrong way and sometimes not even that is necessary.

Good alarm is something unique. You need something that the thief sees for the first time and not something that is mass produced and installed in millions of cars. When a thief sees something for the first time, they are going to pass for an easier target that is not going to surprise them.

I have a plaque on my driver side door. It says "I am electronics engineer and I designed the alarm myself."

I’m surprised to see no comment of Tesla’s sentry mode.

It texts you, it records video footage from all around the car.

If broken into it plays loud music on the speakers.

It works great and is what modern alarms should be.

At least in my jurisdiction (Norway), you install a car alarm because your insurance company still gives you a discount if you have an approved alarm installed.

The cheapest, approved alarm I could find for my beater (an old Land Cruiser) was approx. $200. That translated into a $80/annum discount.

Additionally, I leave the doors unlocked to save any would-be thief the trouble of breaking a window to gain entry. There's nothing valuable inside, anyway.

I cheaped out on the alarm in a car I leased in late 2015 and not two years went by until it got stolen - using the most primitive of methods at that.

Fortunately the insurance money was enough for a down payment on the same model, but highest trim possible - this time including an alarm and GAP.

I've been parking it in the same places and so far it's still with me.

I think that while an alarm won't stop a thief, these people do tend to look for easy targets.

I wonder what proportion of break ins and vandalism were caused by car alarms?

When your sleep is completely ruined at 3am for the 4th night in a row you start to have serious thoughts of hunting down and trashing whatever car is causing it to prevent it from happening again... Noise and lack of sleep drives people to extremes no matter how civil and law abiding they may normally be, it will definitely have happened.

Doonesbury July, 1991: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1991/07/28

I was out washing my car yesterday morning on a quiet residential street (parallel parked at the curb) and a pickup truck was parked at the next spot behind mine.

Suddenly as I'm washing the rear bumper/trunk area the truck's alarm blares at my back.

The neighbor across the street finally turned it off and said "oh sorry I don't even know why they have an alarm button on the key fob."

I just shook my head. It's unnecessary but there really need to be better ways to handle locks.

Also FWIW, not sure why the guy didn't just unlock it at the handle since he drove off anyway, instead of unlocking it all the way from the doorway of his house.

Ahh yep. I call it the "idiot button", as in "I'm an idiot, I pressed this button by mistake"

Ages ago, on a previous car, it was stupid easy for me to hit, for whatever reason. I got pissed off enough I ended up taking the fob apart and destroying the contact over that button.

Thankfully my current car has an option to turn off the beep on lock, and doesn't have a panic button.

Some vehicles will unlock the door with the fob in your pocket when you touch the handle. Many vehicles still require you to touch an unlock button on the fob even when standing at the door.

It would have made it even more awkward as the car screams at both of you though.

With my key it's pretty easy to activate the "panic" feature. It seems like a reasonable feature for someone walking through empty parking lots at night, but it also causes a lot of false alarms.

> Davis Adams, who works at Honda and drives an S2000, told me about a Lotus Elise he used to own that had a motion sensor. "If you locked the door, and moved your hand in the open air," he said, "the alarm would go off. So if you left a dog in the car, or someone leaned in the open convertible to look, it'd trigger the alarm."

20 year Lotus Elise owner here. I have had thieves slash the roof and and steal items. And I would never leave a dog alone in it.

I had an MR-2 for seventeen years, and I hacked my own engine disable system. If you started the car without the (non-heating) cigarette lighter pushed in, then the car would run fine for 30 seconds, and then the fuel gauge would go to zero and ten seconds later the car would die.

I loved the idea, until the system became flakey and I found myself time and again frantically pumping the cigarette lighter, hoping to get it to behave. I finally removed it. (Ah, youth...)

Loud alarms are illegal in Israel, OTH car theft is a big problem there.

The solutions range from immobilizers to GPS trackers being mandatory by insurers, but thieves became smart as well, they know how to bypass an immobilizer in seconds, tear off the GPS tracker moments after they reached an unpopulated area and the best ones come with a replacement engine computer to bypass other built in safeguards.

I still remember a low-tech theft prevention device my friend invented for personal use. He stuck a 100 or so needles into a cushion and upon leaving the car he'd leave the cushion on driver's seat with needles' tips facing upwards. From the outside it looks like a normal cushion but if a thief is to sit on it...

Headline needs a (2015).

Why? Because fear is known to be an effective sales tool. Just ask a very successful marketer of car alarms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_Issa#Business_career

House alarms are worse. People take their car alarms to work with them but the house alarms are here all day.

The answer to the question is "because people are buying them". It is as simple as a supply-demand economy 101. Why people are bying them? Perhaps even if the alarms are not effective they give owners peace of mind, which is good enough reason for them to exist.

Better question: Why are all aftermarket car alarms crap with crap apps?

There is definitely an opportunity here to make something that doesn't suck. If you added a couple of cameras and used ML I think you could build a much better product.

I assume this a local cultural problem.

I do not believe I have ever heard an actual car alarm go off in my life, I have only seen on television, typically in Anglo-Saxon media.

So is this truly as common as the article suggests in some places?

Since I've lived in US cities, yes. Almost daily do I hear a car alarm.

Probably just a factor of:

1. More cars around me in the city than in the small town I came from.

2. More things that can set off the alarms (loud motorcycles being a big one).

Density too. I reckon there are about 200 to 300 cars in the parking garage for my apartment building. You're bound to hear one with so many cars in one place.

I had no idea.

How do people sleep then, if this is so common?

People in dense cities learn to deal with it one way or another. Somewhere like Manhattan, I can practically guarantee you there are going to be sirens (which are probably even louder) during a given night as well.

Boston does this better, where if there isn't traffic, sirens aren't run. At night, sirens are relatively rare. Especially compared to Seattle and Boise where I've also lived.

In Germany, I only ever heard a couple sirens the whole time I lived there, and none directly on my street.

Yes, come to think of it, I have never heard sirens of emergency services drive near at night, but I have occasionally heard them during the day.

How odd. — I rather value my sleep.

I live in Berlin in an area that has many parking cars. I rarely hear an alarm go off. Maybe 2-3 times a year, if at all. I also only know this from anglo-saxony media.

Car alarms seem very rare in some countries. On VWs used car portal in Austria out of 670 VW Passat only 22 have a car alarm. I never had a car with an alarm and never saw a reason to get one.

It’s common enough that mocking birds routinely learn to imitate the sound of common car alarm sequences. It is certainly a public nuisance, but it is not uncommon to hear a car alarm going off in the middle of the night in most American Cities.

It does seem like a piece of security theater that gets put on by the dealer to make people feel safe about making a large purchase. I don’t think they really do much for safety. In San Francisco (my home) we have a ludicrously high incidence of people joy-bashing car windows. The car alarms just make it more annoying for everyone else. A few weeks ago I saw someone stealing a car while the alarm was going off. The alarm didn’t stop them, but at least it made it easy to report them to the police.

I am not trying to be a smart ass but how about "find my car" for the police via GPS unit powered by the alternator?

The alarm on my new car sends me an email and a notification through the manufacturers mobile app if it gets activated.

To make the owner of the vehicle feel better. That's all they were ever for.

And insurance companies to add a risk adjustment, just like with “do you park your car in a garage?”

I've been wanting to set up a little raspberry pi or arduino to act as an alarm, which can first play 'welcome to the jungle' and then roll the windows up and lock all the doors, before starting the car, turning the wheel to full lock and just sitting on the rev limiter.

I always figured it was more peace of mind than actual protection.

> THE CAR ALARM IS BOTH INEFFECTIVE AND ANNOYING. IT'S ALSO UNNEEDED.

I'm not sure which definition of unneeded the author is using, but I would say car thefts makes them needed? Could say they are ineffective, but still needed

Are magic anti-theft spells also needed?

We need some solution. Alarms are the only solution we have at the moment. So, until there's something else, alarms are necessary

If alarms stopped existing, the problem would not be any worse. So alarms are not necessary.

says who?

The original article, me, and a few others in this comment section.

> It's also unneeded: it's nearly impossible to start a modern car without the key.

> But, as Roger Morris at the National Insurance Crime Bureau explained to me, guys will "break in, roll the car to a vacant lot, and strip it for parts. Breaking into cars is a billion-dollar business."

In Brazil they rob the sound system, and other things, in place. Maybe that's more common with older cars, that only had a CD player, but it happens.

With my sister's car, they just broke down the door (like, folded it down a bit), stole the stereo, the CDs, and other stuff that was inside.

You know those car stereos that you could take the front off? A friend of my parents did that. They keyed the car, screwed with the door, and wrote that the stereo would have been cheaper...

So yeah, I would say that an alarm might have helped in those cases.

better, why do they still make car horns?

To alert other people about your presence.

What would you do if a car was reversing and it looked highly probably they are going to hit you? Or when driving round blind bends on single track roads?

It has very valid use cases, it just happens to be abused by idiots quite often

I think it's actually illegal not to have an operational horn. Sound travels faster than cars so it's a great mechanism to communicate presence during an emergency.

Ah.. so the real question is, why do they still make idiots?

One problem with car horn is the cars that beep it every time you lock your doors...

Almost every car that has the ability to disable this, including my 2004 Subaru. The method was strange and complicated but it did work.

but many people don't and when you live in a dense area, horns beep all the time, often because of that.

I have a 2003 Subaru, and it was just "hold the lock/unlock buttons for two seconds".

Yes, I hate that feature, especially when a rental car has it and I can't figure out easily how to disable it.

There are occasional valid uses for horns. I would like a mandatory feature that limits honks per mile to a reasonable maximum.

For some countries, it could alternatively implement a reasonable minimum limit.

In large cities people ignore car alarms and are more and likely going to attract a brick through the window from pissed of neighbors. The biggest issue is people with car alarms have the sensitivity so low anything triggers them. I used to live in a condo, owned a Fatboy and when I fired up the bike and rode up the underground parkade 6-10 cars alarms would go off.

Congrats on finding something more disruptive than car alarms.

well I had muffled pipes, not straight pipes and I never gunned the bike with people around or at stop lights. In the parkade I would put around. The reason for the alarms going off was the resonance and vibration of the bike with its crappy rubber engine mounts. I have always found tuner cars with their fat pipe exhausts way worse.

You meant sensitivity so _high_?

I think this is a case like high/low granularity or bi/semi- annual where either directions are sometimes used mean either meanings.

Your loud-ass vehicle shouldn't be legal.

Seriously. I've been considering bricking a couple of the street racers in my neighborhood lately. One of the idiots likes to rev the engine to vent his frustration as he drives back and forth looking for parking.

The funny thing is, a lot of the loud cars aren't even that fast. My 2.4L SUV beats a lot of those fools sporting straight pipes.

I owned the bike for 2 years about 15+ years ago before I t-boned a car (their fault). The bike was written off. It was the first and last Harley I ever owned. After that I switched to Japanese and Italian bikes.

I wonder if there is some geographical variation in the alarm sensitivity. I rarely hear car alarms in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. I have never noticed that any slight bumps or vibrations would set car alarms off. I have even scratched a few cars in the parking lot with my own car back in the days when I had just gotten my license, and still no alarms.

Car theft is relatively rare here too.

>Car theft is relatively rare here too

Well, you *are* living in a country with some of the highest economic equality in the world!

Well, I was more wondering if there is some correlation between the occurrence of car thefts and the sensitivity of car alarms. Do they make the alarms less sensitive in countries with less car thefts?

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