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With growing car theft in the US I've been curious about implanting GPS trackers on my own older enthusiast vehicles. There appears to be many options on Amazon but I can't bring myself to trust any of them. Has anyone here gone down that road before?

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I would only do this if you either know the police will help retrieve your car if you have the location, or if you are ready to engage the robbers yourself. Otherwise it's useless to know where it is.

I have experience trying to get the cops to help in Oakland and San Jose and they really didn't want to.

A lot of the cellular gps trackers have ignition kill capability, where you can send it a specific sms message and it’ll pull a wire to ground or open circuit a pair of wires, which you can use to remotely kill the engine.

A friend of mine got a motorcycle back by watching its movements via the gps tracking, and killing the engine while the guy was riding in a safe-ish and high visibility place, so the thief just parked it and walked away.

I imagine (not a lawyer) that this expose you to a variety of charges.

IANAL, but I think in California as long as you don't use excessive force it's ok, but yeah if you kill the engine at a high speed or if you get unlucky and the thief gets seriously injured then you will get in trouble if they want to go after you.

Who's gonna sue him? The car thief?

Potentially, or more likely the public prosecutor after the coroner's report comes in.

This is ridiculous. Wtf are cops good for, then?

Cracking heads. The rest is just PR.

They don't work for you. They know they don't work for you.

Tbf oakland is a low bar (as well as sf). Here just 15 mi down the road they investigated and arrested a credit card thief who stole my wife’s card and I didn’t even ask for it. They also regularly capture cat converter thieves with sting operations. Overall I’ve been quite impressed with San Mateo PD

We were also surprised by the Oakland thing, as I know they helped with petty crime where the damage was less than a full blown stolen car. It was not a very shady area and it was in their jurisdiction. I heard it's not that uncommon, and a SFPD officer told us that it's probably because we said the robbers where armed and they just don't get involved with that.

The car got recovered by an asset management crew though and it went smoothly AFAIK.

I second this. I even had a local Bay Area PD help me recover a stolen bike after finding it posted.

From European experience: dealing with violent crime and writing reports for insurance claims for others.

If you want to diy it, Check out ray Ozzie's recent project featured here on HN recently. Very reasonable priced with one up front payment for (10 ?) years of connectivity

Here are some articles and projects where we show how to do Asset Tracking. One article is about an Iceland trip, the other is about building out a GPS tracker, complete with data dashboards.

Iceland: https://blues.io/blog/vacation-gps-asset-tracker/

Full Asset Tracking Project: https://www.hackster.io/paige-niedringhaus/low-code-gps-asse...

Adapting this for a car would be straightforward.

$49 for the device and data: https://blues.io/

https://blues.io/

This feels like a dumb question, but I can't find dimensions of the Notecard anywhere and I can't quite judge the scale from the pictures. How big is it?

https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/blob/master/Notecard/... has the measurements, looks like 35mm x 30mm

Keep in mind that’s he card with a M.2 edge connector on one end. Mostly you’d be plugging that into something, at least to hook up the power/data lines. They sell “Note Carriers” for that, which end up making the combo bigger than that.

Here’s a pic of the note card plugged into their Raspberry Pi note carrier. That’s a standard 40 pin 0.1” spacing connector on the left, so it’s 2” plus the mounting holes in that dimension. 65x57mm and about 20mm tall for the stackable 40 pin socket+pins.

https://flic.kr/p/2mkQAS7

What service are they using that gives 10 yrs of connectivity for a flat price?

Probably "VC Cash".

I've got a couple of the units and can say they are working well and very easy to interface with.

It's not 10 years of unlimited data. It's 500MB of data usable over 10 years.

-Wouldn't an airtag (or two...) fit the bill nicely?

(Assuming even car thieves use iPhones there's some poetic justice to be served in their own smartphones bringing them down...)

I think the airtag might actually alert them that they are being tracked - the anti-stalker features built into the network will alert an iPhone user when an airtag they don't own is in the vicinity while moving and changing locations.

If the air tag is sufficiently hidden, perhaps this is a feature and not a bug. Maybe this will make them stop the car and leave it, which sounds like a win to me.

They will get a warning saying there is an air tag travelling with them. I have this problem. We have an air tag on one of my kids shoes when we are out, and whenever I’m not with them, my partner gets spammed with warnings on her phone saying there is an unknown air tag travelling with her.

> We have an air tag on one of my kids shoes when we are out

what the hell?

Right? Who the hell puts the tracker in a shoe? Shoes can be taken off.

Professionals put the trackers in the kids' teeth, a la Spy Kids.

Seems legit, kids can run away or be kidnapped. It’s important to know where your kids are.

> Seems legit, kids can run away or be kidnapped. It’s important to know where your kids are.

Ah yes. This statement is more terrifying than Apples half-assed PR fireball a few days ago.

The same folks who bought iphones because its has better "privacy" than Android...

...are using iphones to track their kids whereabouts. It's like a dystopian punchline masked in the Friends laugh track.

Tracking a kid at an amusement park, presumably a quite young one, is entirely fine IMO. I remember when I was 4 or so, I waited until my parents weren't looking to sneak off and go play with a toy in the gift shop my parents didn't let me see earlier in the day. I just about gave them a heart attack.

Right. All depends on age. Makes sense for an 8y/o, not for a 15y/o

This is for a 3y/o and a 5y/o

Yeah it is important to know where your kids are. I go with "pay attention".

I guess there are going to be scenarios where tracking could help and maybe even allow the kids freedom to roam within a large zone - the back paddock of a farm say - while still allowing parents to find them.

But I still like capability and trust more.

Some people have more children than adults. “Pay attention” is the default state but it’s not always possible to pay complete attention to both children and everything else, every moment of every day.

I really think you’re holding parents to an unreasonably high standard. The punishment for a moments lapse in not paying attention shouldn’t be a missing 4 year old.

We use this when we are at amusement parks, museums or in the city. We also have a piece of white tape, with our phone number, on the kids so that if they get lost, and someone finds them, they can call us up.

That's Apple's so-called "stalker warning", a ridiculous concept.

> a ridiculous concept

Says a guy who’s never had a friend or family member who’s been stalked.

If someone can get close enough to drop an AirTag on your person or in your car, they can harm you regardless.

A lot of people have the opportunity to interact with your (unattended) car or your belongings in situations where they couldn't harm you without taking a substantial risk. Imagine a person you interact with at a bar who drops an AirTag in your purse while you are briefly distracted.

> With growing car theft in the US

Odd, this got me wondering, and I can’t find any reliable statistics that show a rise in car thefts. Everything I see shows a pretty steady decline over the past 30 years in spite of an increasing the number of cars on the road.

Check out AutoPi. Open source, plugs into your ODBII port so you can not only track your car but also get maintaince alerts etc.

Depending on how old the enthusiast vehicles are, they probably don't have an OBD-II port (or possibly any port at all). None of mine do, up to the mid 90s.

My truck barely has an electrical system (6v, positive earth), let alone a computer.

1996 is when OBD2 became mandatory for all cars manufactured in the United States

> plugs into your ODBII port

Which is usually quite easy to check. It's not a guarantee, but with someone sophisticated enough to crack a modern car there's a good possibility they know to check the OBDII slot.

They come with extension cables. You can always plug it in under the dash and leave the exposed one disconnected.

If they are sophisticated and have time to take the whole car apart then you are SOL anyway as they will find any transmitters with an SDR.

It might be an interesting project to build your own in this case.

If you want to trust them I would have as much redundancy as you are comfortable paying for i.e. the software in these products is often dogshit so one failure or bug shouldn't let your car end in a scrap merchant.

AirTag

Doesn’t work as it notifies the person traveling with it.

Of you hide it well enough? I can think of some creative spots in a car, like behind the dash, in the door, inside of the a seat, etc.

If the thief has an iPhone, they will see this: https://sm.mashable.com/mashable_pk/image/default/uploads252...

It's quite easy to clobber the speaker

It still alerts (UI Prompt) on any iPhone that it travels with for too long (~24hr).

I thought it only chirped if the owner clicked that option in "Find My" app.

Its not that it is chirps it is that any iPhone beeing tracked by a airtag for a extended amount of time will inform its owner that it is being tracked.

What if I don't have an iPhone

I second this, and hope someone has some advice/input.

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