Armored Stealth Boat: How to Smuggle Luxury Cars (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Armored Stealth Boat: How to Smuggle Luxury Cars (2016)

hisutton.com

122 pointsBluestein80 comments

(Webjanitor) sorry the site is slow to load, I’m actually amazed it’s holding up at all considering how it’s really not dimensioned to! It is a one core vm with no ram and Mb throttle: it’s normally doing a few dozen visitors a minute, kinda thing.

There’s loads more super interesting tech posts on this blog, so do bookmark and visit later when it’s quieter :)

Have you considered putting it behind cloudflare? It would offload your static assets from your vm with very little configuration.

Fuck cloudflare and their anti-privacy gatekeeping.

Great site, sir :)

... interesting stuff, with original artwork to boot.-

Very slow speeds so here's the archive.org mirror.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210301050115/http://www.hisutt...

https://archive.is/2VWXc

Can someone explain why smuggling cars is a market? You’re driving the cars on the street after you’ve smuggled it in, so wouldn’t the police just take it from you minutes into your first drive ? I also don’t imagine this is to avoid an import tax since it just seems to be 15%-35% [0]. Is there some other markup you avoid by smuggling in the car?

[0] https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/china-is-said-to-cut...

A few years back my plate expired sometime in January, and though I'd ordered a replacement and put it in my glove compartment. I realized to the error my embarrassment mid-march, and changed the plates out to correct the issue. I drove my car daily for nearly three months, often past police vehicles. Never once had I been pulled over, because I drive responsibly and my municipality isn't dependent on tickets for too large a share of its budget.

Expired plates are much higher on an officer's list of things to check than figuring out whether every oddly badged or exotic looking car on the streets can be legally imported for its model year. Even if you do get caught, the fact that you could afford to illegally import a vehicle is a good sign that you can afford the legal fees and fines required to forestall any asset seizures. Especially in China, where affluence and political connections often go hand in hand (not that it isn't the case in the rest of the developed world to some extent either).

Where do you live? I’m pretty sure in Australia your registration is checked automatically whenever you drive past a police car, which are all equipped with cameras.

Is the ticketing automated? In my (NZ) experience, you don’t get pulled over and they leave that crap to parking wardens, who do it with pleasure.

When I walk through car parks I notice plenty of cars with expired registration.

In Australia it is state based. In South Australia some fixed cameras will automatically issue tickets (still in pain from a $600 fine I got once).

Not sure about the mobile police ones.

United States. The vehicle had a dealer plate on it (paper, handwritten)

I have seen numerous cars driving around with months long expired tabs. Right now it isn't being heavily enforced, and these tickets are quite hefty, often several hundred dollars, and are not considered a moving violation. (Seattle, WA, USA)

Not sure about WA, but over here in OH we have a covid extension - if your registration expires between March 2020 and April 2021 you have until July 2021 to renew. So I've been driving a vehicle with an expired temp tag from November.

Automated plate readers and live queries to the DMV/Registry are much more prevalent in just the last few years.

Smuggling luxury cars is a big thing in Thailand. There is a 200% tax to import them. There are busts reported in the news now and then. Sometimes it's a shipment of "used" car parts which is really a container of disassembled super cars shipped in to be reassembled and sold. Sometimes it is cars imported by alleged students who were studying overseas and can bring back the cars they were driving for only a 30% import tax.

The police aren't much use for enforcing laws in Thailand, especially against the rich kids.

The most egregious case of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wichian_Klanprasert

TL;DR: Red Bull heir kills a cop with speeding Ferrari and runs from scene. Heir mysteriously avoids all charges and summons with increasingly farcical excuses on both sides, until all charges are mysteriously dropped 10 years later.

Yeah, that's a good example of how the rich can get away with anything in Thailand. In most places if you kill a cop the cops make sure you get what's coming to you. But here even the cops can't get justice for other cops if the perp is the brat son of the ultra rich.

The police in smuggling destinations are corrupt, so once you have the car into the country you can just pay off the police to ignore it. But getting through the border is harder and would involve much larger bribes.

To avoid paying taxes and customs on the car, which can add up to quite a bit.

If the taxes are high enough to fund the development & operation of military-like boats, I think the problem isn't the smuggling but a greedy government. They can destroy this market overnight by just making the taxes more reasonable, and maybe even end up ahead if it means they no longer have to spend money on enforcement.

>greedy government ...just making the taxes more reasonable

Like Australia? Look a their bustling car manufacturing sector and all the jobs it created, or US and their electronics manufacturing might. Why make reasonable taxes when you can use protectionism to bootstrap whole industry? Sprinkle some mandatory 49-51% co ownership and you have a real winner on your hands.

Australia doesn’t have much of a car industry

There's a big enough market for stolen cars, that the tax level probably wouldn't make a difference.

Because cops don't really have so much free time that they can just suddenly detect a smuggled car and pull it over. Unless the cop car has plate readers or a read BOLO match the smuggled car's description, they can't really know anything about the car as long as all of the other gov't issued stickers are up to date.

Could it be that rich persons are largely ignored by the police? What lowly officer would risk their career to embarrass a wealthy powerful person?

There's a big market in cars stolen abroad. Because they're not legitimate at all, they have to be smuggled in.

I lived in Hong Kong in the late 80s/early 90s. The predecessors of these boats, always mid-grey to blend with a cloudy horizon, and with 4 x Evinrude 250HP outboards on the back were quite a common fixture in most harbours and quite a sight to behold going at full pelt.

Note that on the military side, I'm a little doubtful that landing a single tank is something any military would try. Tanks are prone to breakdowns and need a lot of logistical support, and so usually operate in platoon size of at least 5 of them. Even landing 5 or 10 of them with a bunch of these things seems a bit dubious, you're still gonna need something to bring in tons of fuel, ammo, spare parts, etc.

You'd use four individual craft to put a troop of tanks ashore. A troop of tanks would be an enormous asset to an infantry or commando battle team. And in the next few hours you could land another troop, and then another.

They can look after themselves for 48 hours. That's a lifetime in terms of a landing operation.

Here's a Royal Navy landing craft delivering a Royal Armoured Corps full-size main battle tank ashore recently.

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/guide-british-amphibious-sea...

And didn't the British do this in the Falklands for real not that long ago? It was smaller tracked recce cars, not main battle tanks, but you get the idea.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/12/08/TELE...

Yes, the difference between having even one tank where no one was expecting it and 0 tank, is huge.

Your doubt is misplaced. The most heavily used US Navy landing craft can only carry a single tank.

https://www.navy.mil/Resources/Fact-Files/Display-FactFiles/...

Very cool & interesting. Also interesting is that only 91 of these craft were built & delivered -- that seems like such a tiny number. And, apparently, only 68 are earmarked to be kept & maintained ('SLEP') it seems:

"All of the planned 91 craft have been delivered to the Navy. A Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) is currently in progress to add 10 years of service life to the craft design life. A total of 68 LCAC will have undergone service life extension by the conclusion of the program in 2021."

The use case describes was for a raiding party prior to the main landing, in which case ~hours are needed until the main force arrives. Tanks can operate without resupply for this long, and in the case of a surprise raid a single MBT to support an small unit infantry support seems like it could multiply their effectiveness at attacking unprepared soft targets like logistics nodes and edges.

It's not clear why "armor" is part of this. It seems like if someone is firing on you in one of these you've already lost.

The article mentions turning cars upside down to “alter their silhouette”, so maybe the metal blocks detection.

I think that was referring to smuggling the old way in containers.

>Whatever their origin the newly arrived cars are covered by duplicated and forged licenses documents and enter the market unchallenged.

umm how do you register hundreds of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in a country with less than 10 legit cars of that make and model? Clearly the problem is not smuggling, but corruption allowing legitimization of contraband.

Smuggling implies that either the country of export doesn't want it going out, or the country of import doesn't want it coming in.

I was not aware that you're not allowed to buy a car in europe or the US and ship it to China.

What's the background here? I assume you are not? Why is that?

It may be that you are not allowed to buy a car in Europe or the US and ship it to China without paying Chinese import duties on it.

> Smuggling implies that either the country of export doesn't want it going out, or the country of import doesn't want it coming in.

Not really. You can be smuggling to evade taxes, eg. cigarette smuggling.

China has limits on the importation - in addition to tarrif and requirements like the undercarriage being cleaned of foreign soil they have limits on importing foreign cars as one per person and Chinese residents only. Likely protectionism motivated - it fits with their other foibles resulting in things like having iPhones they built smuggled back into their own country at a marked up price.

I think China has pretty strict limits and taxes on importing vehicles as a way to support local manufacturers.

China, and many other developing countries, have absurdly high (100%+) taxes on cars not manufactured locally.

Import taxes are higher on expensive cars ~10%, so this is tax evasion: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/01/china-hikes-tax-on-imported-....

It's often because the cars are stolen or to avoid paying import tax.

As it says in the fine article, China wants to encourage its own luxury and performance car making segment by restricting foreign imports.

I think China was trying to levy something like a a 50% or a 100% import tax on imported vehicles.

Yes, luxury imported vehicles are taxed anywhere in between 200% to 300%

Protectionism of local manufacturers, I take it ...

Imagine if the us matched the tariff on Chinese made cars.

You cannot import cars into US unless the exact same model been crash tested in US.

And of course, manufacturers abuse it to lock US market.

Once a car that was never sold in the US turns 25, it can be imported for road use.

https://helpspanish.cbp.gov/s/article/Article-278?language=e...

They can imported before that for museum, collections, or racing-only use, of course.

But there’s nothing stopping manufacturing in China and selling those cars in the us. No super high tariffs either ranging from 2.5 to 25%. Lower than chinas that’s for sure.

I think you've confused smuggling with trafficking.

Tax is a bitch.

Great article and all blog, bookmarked

Some other juice photos

Narco Submarines Covert Shores Guide - updated

http://www.hisutton.com/Narco%20Subs%20101.html

It's a low profile bulletproof boat, looking at the air intakes and spikes on the prow, it is not designed with X-band stealth as a primary concern.

What is happening with these images, CDN.

Amazing concept though the other type of thing being smuggled seems to have a different approach(nearly 100% submerged).

> What is happening with these images, CDN.

slow server + progressive jpeg?

> progressive jpeg

That's a thing? I didn't know you could do that on purpose thought it was a side effect of slow internet.

I've used CSS blurring before/loading different sized images but I think this is different when reading up on it.

Yes, it is a thing: https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2012/progressive-jpegs-a-new.... Some people do use it intentionally.

>That's a thing? I didn't know you could do that on purpose thought it was a side effect of slow internet.

Well if you don't have it enabled, the area that is shown would be proportional to how much you have loaded (eg. if you have 50% of the picture downloaded then the top half of the picture will be shown, but the other half would be blank/transparent). If you have it enabled, then you might have the whole picture shown at 5% downloaded, but it will be super blurry, and as you download more it gets progressively more detailed.

I don't think the author/publisher purposely used this as an effect, it's just an overloaded server and whatever image editing software he used had progressive jpeg enabled.

Yeah that's interesting good to know

It's designed specifically for slow internet speeds. After ADSL type of speeds became the norm, the use progressively loading images slowly faded away.

Good read. It seems like a good plot for 'Miami Vice'.

>Hong Kong has right-hand drive cars, a legacy of British rule

This does annoy me. One third of the world drives on the left. It's not an oddity, it's just a thing.

Most of those countries were part of the British Commonwealth. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

My point was that it is so common it shouldn't need some sort of explanation. It's just a US centric viewpoint that requires it.

Well, obviously it's not just a US centric viewpoint. It's Chinese also.

Oh dear. But there was no explanation why they drive on the right. Because that's what everyone does.

Aren't the cars made there anyway

Not ones like Lamborghini Aventadors and Bentley Continental GTs (although because of demand, not all Bentleys are made at Crewe anymore - some are made in continental Europe)

"The smuggling of cars into china has been a widespread problem since at least the 1980s, and slowly evolved into an arms race between the authorities and the smugglers. The ultimate smuggling boat is known as the Armored Stealth Boat (ASB). You read that correctly; this may sound too James Bond to be real, but it is."

The ultimate smuggling boat that we know about.

> that we know about.

Good point!

  (For all we know, these people might be running full "Red October" style operations out there :)

what impressive is it looks like a professional design and construction, not DYI like for example those Columbian drug smuggling submarines.

It could be a "third shift" manufacturing operation at some legit factories.

There is more manufacturing capability in China!

But both the submarine and the ASB are marvelous creations of the human mind to resist the state overreach.

It makes me wonder which technical marvels we are not seeing, and how much bigger China economy could be if only we let innovators freely innovate: selling better submarines to Columbian cartels maybe could lead to better autonomous boats?

Because they serve different purposes.

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