Or, enforce existing laws against theft ...
"Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks; there's always another circumvention.
"Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks; there's always another circumvention.
Setting minimum standards is a critical function of governments in maintaining healthy markets because it prevents cheating from being cost effective. If you make a safety feature optional, you will have some fraction of people say that they don’t need it and then cost society money when it turns out they were wrong. In the case of poor locks, even if much of the cost is paid by the owners’ insurance there’s still a lot of expense from the extra police and court costs, and stolen cars are often used to support other crimes.
Yeah people, nothing can have perfect security. That's a given anyway. I think the point is that if you can steal it with a $250 device SDR device, the car's level of security is the issue not the device and that should be acknowledged by their government before they ban something that will do nothing except put these things in the hands of only the bigger crime groups. These things likely wouldn't be hard to manufacture by hand if these criminals wanted to get a hold of them.
Many commenters on HN lean libertarian, thus some will go through great lengths and mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that government regulation is (part of) the answer.
Seatbelts are not adversarial. A better seatbelt does not encourage other drivers to crash their cars into you even harder or anything like that, it's people versus nature.
Security systems are in a permanent arms race, people versus people. You could have a more expensive lock that requires a more expensive device to defeat, but this makes your car more expensive to make, so it has a higher price, so it becomes a more valuable target, and so on.
But if the fancy insecure lock is more expensive, the problem should fix itself eventually, right? Consumers will switch back to the cheaper system of their own accord.
It sucks for the people who bought the insecure cars without knowing, but banning insecure cars is not going to help them retroactively in any way.
I dont think they are so desirable just because they are more secure but they dont have remote start options so they are at least in part more secure than modern remote start cars. The problem I am getting at is that there are no secure modern car options. None.
I don't think there can be such a thing as a secure remote start option. The only way they can make it more secure than traditional keys is if they also make it less convenient to use than traditional keys, and then there is no point because the traditional keys will be easier and cheaper.
What happened is that consumers did not know that the remote keys were unsafe, and now they know.
What I don't understand is why insecure cars should be banned by law. Now that everyone knows about the issue, surely everyone will switch to a more secure system of their own accord.
Insurers aren't usually charities. Those costs are still borne by the insured.
https://www.hbsslaw.com/press/hyundai-kia-car-theft-defect/c...
Which then - Dealers still sell Hyundais and Kias vulnerable to theft, but insurance is hard to get https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173048646/hyundai-kia-car-th...
And in October - Wheels Of Steal: Some Kias, Hyundais Easy To Hotwire; Owners Sue Carmakers, Get $200 Million https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/kia-hyundai-ant...
The Challenges of Insuring a Kia or Hyundai in 2024 - https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/insuri...
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I suspect that this has lead to Kia and Hyundai taking note of insurance rates and changing things.
It doesn't help that premium calculations are nonlinear and trade secrets. In the real world, it would take a computer and a large database to fuzzily estimate the impact of a particular car purchase on your personal premiums forecasted over the next few years with an error margin any less than a few hundred dollars per year (unless your life is particularly stable and well aligned to some major stereotype you can use to get a closer estimate).
If each insurer just published a table of the incremental impact of a given model of car (or better yet, how linear contributions for theft vs crash-rate vs death-rate-on-crash vs ...) then that'd be easy enough to use during purchasing. If you own a 90s civic in Oakland vs Redwood City though you're much more likely for the defective security measures to be used, and the insurers use a proxy for that information in their calculations, so in practice you have to get a personalized quote for every single car you might be interested in purchasing. Moreover, if you buy the car in a low-car-crime locale and move you can still be surprised by the massive rate hike [0]. And so on; modeling arbitrary risk is complicated, which is (part of) why professionals get paid the big bucks to do it. If there are other workable solutions, I'd prefer most of those to requiring the general public to have to do non-trivial math and statistics for every car purchase, especially above and beyond what they already have to do when estimating the total lifetime costs due to fuel economy or whatever.
[0] My personal solution was just to sell the car in that low-car-crime locale where it had a market value and buy a new vehicle in my destination, but then you're trading premiums for transaction costs, which isn't easy to model if you don't know how often you'll move in 5yrs either (hindsight, definitely worth it by a wide margin).
The responsible party should be the automaker that built or installed the security system, not the person who was sold a lie.
Flipper, lock picks, bolt cutters, etc. are all reasonable tools. So is the expectation that using them to commit a crime should result in penalty for the individual committing a crime using those tools, not the target of the crime they are committing.
Punishing people for taking advantage of that vulnerability is certainly warranted, but it's also closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the problem.
They sold a negligently defective product.
> How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea...
They aren't. If I write code with a SQL injection in it, it's bad code even if no one winds up attacking it.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/kia-and-hyundai-vehicles-in-can...
Meanwhile other modern countries (albeit with much stricter law enforcement and a more unified value system) can operate with 0.1% of the equivalent crime and that’s not what we aspire to. Instead we want to blame the manufacturer who must have certainly enticed antisocial, destructive behavior. What an awful and poisonous worldview.
It seems entirely reasonable to take the article's point of view which is "don't ban FlipperZero just because it can be used to facilitate car theft [among 1000 other uses], but rather regulate cars so that they become harder to steal".
Further, I realize you didn't put a ton of thought into the specific 0.1% figure, but I seriously doubt that other modern countries are 1000x better on equivalent crime measures than either the US or Canada.
Even New Zealand, with quite strict gun laws, has a firearm death rate that is a little over 1/12th that of the US's: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...
No. Car manufacturers should still take reasonable steps to prevent it.
To make an analogy, people should not steal from banks... but it would still be negligent to leave the bank unlocked at night.
Kia needs to fix their fuckup AND organized gangs need to be investigated and broken up.
I can only speak about US law, but there has been repeated case law that the police do not have a duty to protect any person in particular (except possibly when people are in their custody which isn't really relevant here).
The function of the police isn't to stop criminals in the act - given their response times that's largely impossible anyhow (well, outside of traffic violations). They largely deter crime by catching criminals after the fact.
The examples given like military facilities have secure fences, 24 hour guards, etc. They are actually secure facilities. As opposed to someone's driveway.
Unless you are an MP, that stuff stays in the armory cage. And if you are headed to the range, ammunition is delivered separately to the range and systems are stringently checked for ammo before returning, afterwards they will do a lockdown inspection of the barracks and everyone's personal vehicles.
No; willfull negligence is something that should engender liability.
The same isn't true for, say, Kia/Hyundai's decision not to include immobilizers:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/autos/kia-and-hyundai-vehicles-in-can...
> CNN reported that only 26 per cent of Hyundai and Kia models from 2015 to 2019 were equipped with electronic immobilizers in the U.S., compared with 96 per cent of all other vehicles in those years, making the Hyundai and Kia models roughly twice as likely to be stolen.
Those stats make it pretty clear that immobilization was already the industry standard. Skipping them was like knowingly writing open SQL injection holes in a web application.
> CNN reported that only 26 per cent of Hyundai and Kia models from 2015 to 2019 were equipped with electronic immobilizers in the U.S., compared with 96 per cent of all other vehicles in those years, making the Hyundai and Kia models roughly twice as likely to be stolen.
If 96% of buildings in a neighborhood have iron bars over the ground floor windows, and you build a development in which only 26% of them do, yes... that's probably negligent, unless there are other factors to explain the discrepancy.
If theives start disproportionately breaking into your development's properties, your tenants can probably be a bit miffed about your lack of security measures.
the "there are always bugs" refrain is horribly corrosive - it doesn't absolve the victim in any sense.