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Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

What about an old fashioned mechanical key?

Car manufacturers are directly to blame for the increased theft of cars. It is a win win for them, as it results in higher car sales. If a dood manufacturer would sell doors that can be easily opened, everyone would complain. Far less so with cars.

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It wouldn't stop anything. You have a car that has everything it needs to start and go just sitting there. Whether you have a physical key, password, retina scanner, you name it the issue is that the thief has physical access. For physical security they can just short some wires to make the car think it has the key, and for digital systems they gain access to the cleartext internal message bus of the car and tell it to start. The latter is the one that has more promise on making it actually secure because you can make the software required to drive the car and the car physically can't move without it but that comes with a lot of usability and performance trade-offs.

Do you believe that mechanical keys were a deterrent before the introduction of the immobilizers? And if they were why did they bother with immobilizers, anti-theft alarms, and GPS trackers?

Car theft rates were lower with mechanical keys. See below UK statistics

Keyless cars top the list for most stolen cars across the UK, with around 93% of all stolen vehicles in 2020 being taken without vehicle keys.

This is not statistics. What percentage of the new cars are keyless?

Here are stats for UK. Total cars stolen in UK dropped from ~300K to ~100K in the last 20 years. [1] Even though number of cars keep growing [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/303551/motor-vehicle-the...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299972/average-age-of-ca...

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