I wonder what the thieve does with the car after stealing. Will you always need that Nokia to start it or is there some kind if aftermarket for counterfeit keys?
Then they end up in a container ship bound for West Africa.
https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/car-stolen-from-an-ontario-street...
The cost of these devices is out of the 'simple criminal' pricerange, but is a minimal expense to a crime ring that can export a boatload of stolen cars at a significant profit as these cars go for significant price premiums overseas.
Apparently quite common with Teslas as well, there is no way you can sell a whole functional car to anyone(well, not in any developed country anyway), but stripping them to pieces and selling them elsewhere is relatively common.
Volvo took really aggressive steps basically making sure that every component in the car that has any kind of electronic chip inside it has to authenticate with the car's VIN or it won't work at all - really annoying for the 2nd hand parts market but hopefully also annoying for thieves.
Modern cars can contain over a mile of wire and some of the important wires are all laid out during early stages of manufacturing, making it difficult to get at them for maintenance. Some cars have better access than others, but if they were carelessly tearing the car down, there's a good chance you need to take off, rewire, and test every ECU in the car.
As far as I can find online, most repair shops ask for about $1700-$2500 just to replace the main wiring harness, including the cost of parts and labour. A luxury Mercedes will have more wires and more automated systems, so you'll easily end up in the higher end of that range.
With a car in such bad shape, I wouldn't want my company to try to repair that car either, not without a "this is a bad idea" surcharge anyway. You just know it'll never run as well as it used to and if you make it a standard practice, you know at least a portion of your customers will blame you for it because you put the "repaired" sticker on that car.
The profitability of the second hand used components market is a real problem. I don't want a future where you can't reuse the parts in a broken down car because of some hard-coded encryption key, but the theft situation is seriously out of hand. Sadly, I think the Volvo approach will be the norm in the future.
On classic cars you can do this sort of thing easily enough, there the chassis was made first and then the wiring loom was put in place but on these modern vehicles you're sore out of luck. And EVs will likely be worse still, what with all the HV DC cabling to motors, batteries and charge ports.
>Ian’s sleuthing found that mostly these cars are destined for export, sent via shipping container to places in Africa
"These cars" might specifically mean things like the RAV4 and that other cars more reliant on good roads have less of a market in "places in Africa".
There must be a noticible flow of parts (eg headlights) to patch up damage caused by the theft. Likely the car manufacturers know, but it's not in their interests to talk about it.
Or chopped up for parts.
Or shipped overseas complete in a container.
If a policeman suspects you of being a car thief and catches you with a Raspberry Pi, that looks pretty suspicious.
The same policeman wouldn't think anything suspicious about (what appears to be) a Nokia cell phone.
Indeed, who did he have to kill to get one?!
I'll have to relay that to my dad who drives around with a small cluster of SBCs mounted into his vehicle
Deniability if searched by police.