For Car Thieves, Toronto Is a 'Candy Store,' and Drivers Are Fed Up
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
At that point, why not just disconnect the spark plugs or wire up an electric switch into the starter motor/fuel pump cabling.
No way those thieves pop the hood and troubleshoot your car for 15 minutes if it doesn't start.
People really treat their cars like magic boxes. And if some wizard has the key to the magic box, their first thought is to build a wall around it...
Makes me appreciate the Amish perspective on technology [0] more the older I get.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/virtually-amish-hacking-innovati...
The solution is regulatory penalties and/or higher insurance premiums that have to be paid by the manufacturer until their cars are certified by something like the UL as having their security systems designed by somebody who went to college.
But of course what will happen is the politicians will ban Flipper Zero and call the job done.
https://www.kiaownersclub.co.uk/threads/warning-to-kia-owner...
Here is one paper describing how shit is car security
"We discovered that Kia and Hyundai immobiliser keys have only three bytes of entropy"
https://tches.iacr.org/index.php/TCHES/article/view/8546/811...
It literally takes <1 minute to steal the car
The advantages of physically inserting the key in the lock are so numerous.
I travel a lot for work and drive a lot of rentals with giant fobs and keyless start. It's just not that great. The fobs are bulky and heavy. My pants pockets are neither baggy nor tight, but the fob is more bulky and awkward than my wallet or phone, and doesn't fit a pocket with either. You still have to handle it, the fob just goes in a cupholder instead of into the receiver in the steering column, and you start by pushing a button instead of turning a key. I just don't perceive any advantage to a remote. Many rentals get a bulky cable with the valet key and the fob and the rental tag, but you have to disassemble the door handle and remove the plastic cover clip thing to insert the key, and
I miss my 2003 Vibe back home, with the simple, flat, light, mechanical key. Insert and turn to unlock. That, a house key, and a Tile or Airtag fit on a split ring in a pocket next to my wallet and weigh less than 40g. My bag has a big ring with all the other keys that one accumulates, but I really, really value being able to travel light.
When do you find value in the ability to lock or unlock the car from a distance? If it's unlocked and you want to lock it, just lock it instead of walking 30 feet away and then trying to lock it. If you are going back to the car and want to unlock it, wait 10 seconds until your hand is at the door handle and then unlock it.
My kid/wife is going to the car, I can unlock the car for them. Or I'm going to carry something from home to the car, I can unlock it first, put the key in my pocket then go to the car directly without having to fumble with the keys.
>>The fobs are bulky and heavy.
Interesting, but that's not my experience. Both my Mercedes and Volvo keyless fobs were smaller in size than my current VW keyfob(which is not keyless and has to be inserted in the ignition). I have seen the BMW abomination of a key though and yeah, that is unnecessarily big.
>>u still have to handle it, the fob just goes in a cupholder instead of into the receiver in the steering column
Uhm, no? Just keep it in your pocket or purse, why would you need to put it in a cupholder? That's the entire point of it - you just keep it on your person somewhere and the car "just" starts.
And in general with fully keyless fobs my key just lives in the pocket of my jeans - so as long as I'm wearing them I can open and start my car, I don't ever need to actually handle the key at all. I go to the car, grab the handle and it magically opens. I hop in, press a button and the car starts. I leave the car and touch the handle and the car closes. I suppose that's mechanically somewhat similar to putting the key into the lock, but so much simpler and takes less time.
>>I miss my 2003 Vibe back home, with the simple, flat, light, mechanical key.
Oh I miss the key for my 1995 Fiat Cinquecento too, that was very nice and small and straightforward. But what made keys big was the immobilizer, not remote control.
Also, depending on car company some of the bulk is hiding last resort physical keys and/or just over-compensating and thinking their brand "needs" big heavy keys as a marketing choice. There's not always a lot of reason that they need to be that much bigger than a Tile or Airtag, the raw electronics are generally really similar.
Additionally, if it was a personal car, some of them even support using just about any major bluetooth-capable phone (or watch) as a remote and you might not even need the extra bulk of a key beyond your additional wearables. That's really tough for rental cars to support, but a great advantage of modern personal cars as the software improves. (Though with the number of hotel chains that have been moving to keys that work on personal phones, I wouldn't be surprised if rental car companies weren't at least investigating the idea of improving those key flows.)
Of course proper engineering is hard and the skill floor will possibly always the dominant thing in news cycles because of the ability to automate the breaks that makes the skill floor really stupidly low. It's a brand new age of "amateur thieves". What won't make as much news is that skill ceiling raise that comes with it and something of the end of an age of "professional thieves". (The final retirements of some of the "Pink Panther" classes of criminals.)
To be fair, some of that fear from such news is perfectly valid. Few of us are likely to be intentionally targeted by professional thieves, but many of us could easily be the accidental targets of amateurs.
So as always, car manufacturers are willing to do something about it if it starts hurting them financially. I'm surprised the same thing isn't happening here - how are people on Toronto getting their cars insured if theft is so rampant?
Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft
A few years back I was reading reports saying that car theft had dropped substantially as it was nigh-impossible to move a car without the key, to the point thieves were even resorting to breaking into homes to get the car keys.
These guys should not be stealing cars, they should be selling replacement keys if it's that easy.
Unfortunately thieves always seem to be a step ahead and figure out things like location of CAN buses to connect diagnostic equipment and clone keys that way, that's why you sometimes hear about cars with ripped out headlamps because there is a CAN bus connector behind them.
Meanwhile, I can't get a spare key fob for my 11 year-old Prius without paying the dealership $524.66.
Obviously there's no patterns to be recognized in there. Nothing whatsoever. Move along citizen.
https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/San-Francis...
Quotes from the article you posted:
"FBI data from 2017 showed that of the 20 biggest cities in the United States, San Francisco had the highest rate of property crimes per capita"
"Walgreens could argue that the level of retail theft in San Francisco remains so high that year-over-year decreases are not moving the needle and operating in San Francisco remains unprofitable"
another link in the article: SF ranks high in property crime while it ranks low in arrests
This is one of the most interesting parts:
> But the police in Ottawa stumbled on it when an officer noticed a Range Rover being backed into a shipping container on a rural property. A second car in the container was Mr. Elworthy’s Ferrari.
> “I was absolutely ecstatic when I got the call from that officer,” he said. “I was literally jumping up and down.”
What happened to the shipping container? Who owned the rural property? Who was working with that person? Where was the shipping container going? Did they catch more than one person in this operation or what?
https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/project-mamba-york-police...
Bicycle theft at scale - easy to find on Craigslist in any college town, corrupt ramp employees at airports steal from checked bags, etc. This stuff is obvious. Yet it goes on and on.
Are police resources unbalanced and if a patrol cop can't bluster his way to an arrest it just doesn't happen? Are cops themselves too corrupt and afraid that overtime and detail fraud would start being investigated? What keeps economically significant crime in business?
Everyone's going to feign ignorance. The container owner will say they didn't realize the container had been stolen from their property, or they rented it to someone who's responsible for whatever they do with it.
The property owner will say they didn't give anyone permission to put a container there, or that they rented it to someone else.
The destination can be just a port, and a moving company can be hired to pick up the container from the port.
(Source: my spouse shipped a lot of stuff from China, and I was horrified at how little security and documentation was involved. I can see how cars cross borders so easily.)
You may be over simplifying things. If you set up some bait cars and catch some thieves, they will probably just be replaced with other low level men. This is likely organized crime so the leaders aren't out there prowling the neighbourhoods. As for the rural property, it might not even be theirs. It could just be any rural property. Ontario, being the most populous of Canadian provinces is still very sparsely populated. A short drive from most big cities can put you in a rural area where owners haven't visited a property in decades.
This is a maddening learned helplessness. In some cities the majority of crime is done by less than 100 people. You can find dozens of examples of this, eg purse thefts in the 90's being one person, or 90% of bike theft being attributed to 11 people. Both anecdotes: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/176177303735813354...
Claiming that new people will magically spring up to take their place is nonsensical, so long as the punishment is not letting them go 5 hours later, as it is in some cities. There is no reason to believe that prosecuting crime will not lower crime and it is fabulous to believe that.
Put them in prison for 10 years first offense. 2nd offence, 15 years and so on. Eventually you run out of people willing to spend decades of their lives in prison to steal a CRV. Set bail at $15k.
What is currently preventing you from taking up the mantle of car thief? Is it simply that some else is already doing it?
Post 9/11, the Western world became obsessive over a sense of security and we've accepted it as a fact of life. To the point where we accept the TSA at airports without complaint, we accept nationwide surveillance, we operate on the internet with an innate understanding that "someone" at the government is watching everything we're doing. We accept these because we've been conditioned to believe that these tactics keep us safe.
As a lot of the population grows up and never experienced a pre-9/11 world, the government, police unions, etc have to ensure that these overbearing "security" tactics have a reason. Therefore, we highlight these "in your city" local crimes to provide validation for what they're doing.
Except time and again they seem To only be highlighting their own ineptitude at keeping anyone safe. Their budgets keep increasing yet it doesn’t seem to lead to any measurable improvement in KPIs.
We do the same with the American military and you'd get called a commie leftist Anti-American snowflake if you even breathe a word about reducing the military budget, even though this 40+ year "Way On Terror" seems like a dud.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
Supisingly, so are motor vehicle thefts. Though, they are on the rise since the pandemic.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191213/reported-motor-ve...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-ve...
So, KPI wise you can make an argument that it is effective. I may not agree with that argument in that we (USA) spend a lot of money and impose a lot of restrictions on the general population to get there.
Crime has always been a "the sky is falling" kind of a thing even if it's literally one crime. We are more safe than we were in 2001 by any objective measure, whether or not that is "safe enough" is going to be different for everyone...
Is it down because of police action or because of changing demographics?
That is, by public service terms, staggeringly expensive.
Another hidden variable in this is police competence. There's a naive assumption that more budget will give better results, but in practice it turns out that there is a lot of basic sloppiness and indifference to "petty" crime. Usually bicycles, not whole cars.
Most police, like most people, are good and want to do good. The US (and likely many other countries) is being plagued by activist DAs who see letting crime slide as a form of restorative justice.