Only on Nantucket: The Curious Case of the "Stolen" Mercedes | Hacker News Reader

Only on Nantucket: The Curious Case of the "Stolen" Mercedes

nantucketcurrent.com

24 pointsbrigham42 comments

Leaving keys in expensive cars in areas where everyone drives the same 5 luxury models is oddly common in some areas like Nantucket. It’s really jarring seeing the reminders from police there when you come from somewhere like NYC.

Reminder that the US is a blend of high and low trust societies existing in geographical proximity.

My parents still leave the door unlocked when they are home, especially if they are expecting anyone. Haven’t rung their doorbell in 25 years.

Meanwhile my condo with lobby staff, self closing & locking doors, many security cameras, etc has had break-ins and robberies ..

I’m not saying Nantucket isn’t high trust, but how much of this story is that versus it being futile to steal a car on a small island with a trivially searchable public car ferry?

My family all grew up on a small island, and from what I can tell all the car thefts were very bored kids taking joyrides.

> My parents still leave the door unlocked when they are home

Growing up, we never locked our doors, ever. My parents only started after a serial burglar a few towns over (a half hour / 45 minute drive away) made the news.

I've never locked the doors at my current house, but I always lock my car doors when I go somewhere... I guess there's only just so much I'm willing to tempt fate.

In the Boston suburbs, commuter belt communities just outside 128, it is common for police to send out reminders to people to lock their cars when they’re parked on their driveways whenever there’s a spate of thefts of valuables from parked cars. I assume it’s not restricted to this particular stretch of suburbia.

Examples: https://patch.com/massachusetts/weston/weston-pd-remind-resi... https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/wellesley-police-urge-re...

This always surprises me because for one thing most modern cars auto-lock, and who even keeps valuables in their car? But apparently there are enough high trust people in the suburbs of a major metro area who leave their cars unlocked that it’s worthwhile for people to walk down leafy streets trying car doors.

“Last week, 10 unlocked cars were hit by thieves along Bristol Road, Sagamore Road, and Tanglewood Road. Surveillance cameras captured a man stealing a 2020 Porsche Cayenne. The crook had his face and hands covered as he entered the SUV, only to find the key fob sitting in the unlocked vehicle.”

And this is in Massachusetts where wealthy people definitely have garages (you are not wasting time clearing snow off your Porsche Cayenne before the school run in February - you keep that car in a garage and let a plow service handle the driveway)

One theory: it’s a UX issue. People have cars with keyless entry and they do not actually know how to lock the car.

> UX issue.

sometimes it's also an entitled lazy humans issue, that no UX could compensate for.

i see endless people driving current (post 2020 anyway) German cars and Cadillacs holding their iPhones with one hand talking into its low side while driving. It's illegal here in Scottsdale AZ, so I've decided those people are just too lazy to take the 1 minute or so to bluetooth pair their phones, or are the entitled sort who think they are more important than the law. many drive incompetently while on the phone, distracted.

Not uncommon

https://www.27east.com/southampton-press/rash-of-car-thefts-...

>My parents still leave the door unlocked when they are home,

I live in a small town, not rural but not a "city", and I haven't locked my doors in so long I don't even know where my house keys are.

Yeah it is weird, we’ve never really locked our doors as a family either.

Like the extended family I mean.

And we are scattered all over the world in different economic situations and trust levels.

I don’t lock now in a smallish coastal town in Oregon and I didn’t lock when I lived in Houston either.

We often start locking after a reminder but it fades away. We do lock at night time though when we go to bed.

I think high trust/low trust looks at it the wrong way around - the reality is more like low mistrust/high mistrust.

Where I live, people barricade their doors like there are barbarian hordes at the gate. Bars on the windows, clamps and immobilisers on the car. They’re terrified a gypsy/indian/african will fall out of the sky and rob them blind - and they’d have to fall out of the sky as literally everyone here is white and born within the surrounding ten km radius. They all trust their neighbours completely, however.

I also trust my neighbours completely, so I leave my keys in the truck, and I haven’t locked the house in five years. The only time there’s been unauthorised entry is when people have left cherries for me on the driver’s seat.

I live on a popular tourist island in puget sound and leave my Lexus SUV unlocked with the key in it wherever I go on the island. Groceries, downtown getting coffee, etc.

I never lock my front door except when I go to bed, and often leave the garage door open when I’m gone.

It’s quite a nice feeling.

Ha, I've "stolen" a rental company BMW in a similar-ish way, basically we turned up to the rental company at an airport in Spain, they threw the keys my way and said the car is a BMW 2 series and it's outside their office. So I walk out and yep, there's a BMW Series 2 parked outside. Hopped in,pressed the start button, drove it to the hotel. Went for a quick swim in the hotel's pool, came back to about 30 unanswered calls from Hertz. They call me again and they go "oh sorry to bother you, just wanted to ask if you could check the number on the key for your BMW, we might have given you the wrong car". I told them the number, they said it's all good, sorry for bothering.

So I went for lunch, came back, another 30 missed calls from Hertz. They call again and ask we're really really really sorry but would you mind going to the car and checking the licence plate on the car. So I said ok, went to the carpark....and yep, it was different to the one on my key.

Turns out that the car right in front of their office was a car that was being prepared for cleaning and they left the key for it in the armrest, which is why it started when I jumped in. They must have pooped themselves when they noticed the car was gone lol. Fortunately they were really nice about it and someone from their office came to see us and brought us the right car. But I imagine the panic in their office when they realized the car is missing.

When I was a kid in the 90s, a teacher in the school shut their car door with their key inside. It was late into the afternoon and the school was a ways out, so with no expectation that they could get service any time soon, other teachers started trying their own keys.

To everyone's surprise, out a car key from a totally different make and model worked. The details of that one instance are obviously fuzzy at this point, but if I had to guess, it might have been made possible thanks to the AutoLatina JV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLatina

Happened to me in the '80's. '71 Buick Skylark. When we went to lunch, our receptionist asked us to drive her Buick as it "was making funny noises." We found it in the 5 storey carpark, took it out and it drove fine. However, we got back rather late, and the carpark was full so we had to park it on the highest level. When we returned, I asked our receptionist, "I thought it odd that you had a St Christopher statue on the dash, I thought you were Baptist?" "No, I don't have a St Christopher on the dash," she replied.

Apparently we took the wrong Buick. The owner, we conjectured, was going to report it stolen since it was sitting 4 floors up on the exposed level.

Not knowing what kind of liability to which we were exposed, we kept it to ourselves.

My mom once opened the wrong '89 Dodge Caravan when grocery shopping in the early nineties, and it wasn't until she got in to drive that she realized it wasn't hers. She said the seat was too far back and then she actually stopped to look around. She said she had simply assumed it was hers since the key worked.

wait so the same key will open any car of the same model???

lol

Depends on the manufacturer how many unique bittings would be made. I believe ~1000 was common. So pretty low chance but high enough a few people have stories here or there.

The birthday paradox probably comes into play here, somehow. Not a mathologist so...

I broke into the wrong car...

Not as bad as it initially sounds as I thought it was mine - which was 20 ft away.

My idiot much younger self.

Wait a minute. There were two G-wagens in the parking lot, one a 1985 model and one (based on the photo) much more recent. These are $100,000+ cars. The owner told the cops the keys were not left inside. Are we saying that a random ignition key from a 40 year old car can start a 21st century G-wagen?

The kids who jack Kias for Tiktok views may just have found a new hobby.

The “stolen” one is a 1991 model according to the article, so not that new (just kept in immaculate condition as the photos show, I was surprised when I saw it was a ‘91), and only 6 years between the two vehicles involved. Given those ages, it’s not shocking Mercedes was using the same key patterns.

In fact other German cars are susceptible to this too. Famously VW uses so few combinations on their keys that it's actually not at all unlikely your key will work with another random VW of the same vintage.

A key is a blank (that has to fit) and then 5 or 6 "teeth" which usually have only 3 or 4 possible depths - that means you have only a few thousand actual possible combinations (some won't work because some locks can't handle two identical in a row, or a tall followed immediately by a short, etc.

Also as cars get older, the ignition and locks get looser until a screwdriver will start it.

They were '91 and '84 models.

> especially at the downtown Stop & Shop. We're very aware of that: there's so many red Jeeps with the keys under the mat."

Guess I won't need to pay for a rental car.

Ah, do you really want to deal with the hassle of stealing thing during vacation?

it's like kiting checks, so as long as somebody is always shopping and other shoppers come and go, there doesn't always need to be a Jeep in the lot.

Now the great question is how come the same key is working with a different car ignition!

And there isn't a reply for that in the article!

There was an episode of Car Talk where a caller described this exact situation. In that case, for the model in question, there were only so many varieties of keys made, so you could use your key on some other cars.

The locks get pretty worn out after 30 years. Probably any key made from the same blank would turn the lock.

I had a friend in college. On his car, any key[1] would turn the driver's side door lock. Not the ignition, though. You could break into his car, but you couldn't drive it off.

[1] For the nitpickers: No, not a skeleton key. Some would probably be too fat to fit in the lock. And so on. But virtually any car key, and maybe even a house key. It was a Chevy, IIRC, but I opened it with a VW key.

Nantucket ... Nantucket ... Ooooch, back to 1990s ... clipper ... xBase compiler ... Nostalgia ... Sorry, excuse me ! ;-)

Survivorship bias perhaps but kudos to a car lasting 34 years in a marine environment. That is impressive.

Old Saab 900s had that issue. Pretty much any (same year or close) key would fit most other 900s.

Nan took it!

In my next life I might feel bad about rich people. Not now though.

Nantucket Island is one of those funny precarious places at risk from climate change. All those rich CEOs and executives with their 2nd homes there, do they care? Do they connect the dots between the externalities of their companies and what they lobby the government for to the fate of that little island?

I think being a CEO means being intentionally blind to externalities.

Why would they care? If it floods they’ll just buy another one.

That’s the essence of financial independence—-having resilience to events that would be catastrophic for a person with less money.

But once people don’t have to care, they tend not to care much at all, and so it seems to reduce empathy as well.

They’d rather spend an extraordinary amount increasing the island’s elevation.

Look at the two estates that former President Obama bought on Martha's Vineyard and Oahu. Does it look like he thinks that global warming is going to be a factor in his life or the lives of his children?

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