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Comment by serjester | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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