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Or, enforce existing laws against theft ... "Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks; there's always another circumvention.
by h2odragon 3y ago
Or, enforce existing laws against theft ...
"Ban insecure vehicles" is chasing the technology of locks; there's always another circumvention.
- ceejayoz 3y agoCompanies that put out egregiously vulnerable vehicles should be held liable, though.
- miohtama 3y agoJustice is being served https://www.hbsslaw.com/press/hyundai-kia-car-theft-defect/court-preliminarily-approves-revised-hyundai-kia-theft-settlement-valued-at-more-than-200-million https://www.hbsslaw.com/press/hyundai-kia-car-theft-defect/c...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tromp 3y agoInsurance companies should reflect unlock vulnerability of a car model in its premiums. That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. What would help is a widely used certification system kept up-to-date by certification authorities in cooperation with insurance companies, similarly to what we have in place for a car model's fuel consumption.
- elif 3y agoCrashes are such an outsized component of insurance coverage compared to theft that this would not be a substantial motivation for manufacturers.
- shagie 3y agoFrom this month a year ago - State Farm declares 105 Kia, Hyundai models ‘ineligible’ for new insurance in Louisiana - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-hyundai-models-ineligible-insurance-louisiana-state-farm-list/article_55fae098-a30d-11ed-afaa-5faa28983298.html https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/kia-hyundai-models-in... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34642224 40 points | Feb 3, 2023 | 90 comments ) 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-theft-tiktok-insurance-dealerships 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-antitheft-settlement/ 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/insuring-your-kia-or-hyundai/ https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/insurance-services/insuri... --- I suspect that this has lead to Kia and Hyundai taking note of insurance rates and changing things.
- drdaeman 3y agoThis penalizes unaware pre-existing car owners. Not only they got a crappy car, they now have to pay more for it - all because the vendor was sloppy. Doesn’t seem fair to me. The responsible party should be the automaker that built or installed the security system, not the person who was sold a lie.
- jonhohle 3y agoOr, you know, the people _stealing_ cars. I feel like this is bizarro world where what was previously accepted as adequate deterrence is now penalized because actual criminals have fewer and fewer incentives to follow established normal behaviors. “Maybe your face shouldn’t have been so punchable” is not a reasonable position to take, imho. 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.
- ceejayoz 3y agoKia and Hyundai saved like $20/car by skimping on a part that all the other major manufacturers include by default, leading to cars that were insecure by design. That's negligent. 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.
- jonhohle 3y agoWhat harm did Kia cause its customer? How are those locks adequate in say, South Korea, where there are 1:20,000 car thefts per capita yearly vs 1:350 in the US. The locks are not the problem. Stealing cars is the problem.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> What harm did Kia cause its customer? 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.
- hansvm 3y ago> That still leaves the problem that few people look at insurance premium when choosing what car to buy. 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).
- lupusreal 3y agoWe'll end up banning windows at this rate, they're an egregious vulnerability in cars and buildings alike. American cities, soft on crime, can't stop thieves from breaking windows so maybe they'll go after car manufacturers and construction firms instead. Going after companies instead of criminals is more aligned with their left-wing sensibilities, I think that's what this is really about.
- ceejayoz 3y agoThat's not what egregious means.
- fargle 3y agoyeah it kinda is
- ceejayoz 3y agoNo. Windows balance a variety of competing needs - security, ventilation, egress during emergencies, mental health, lighting, etc. It would be, perhaps, egregiously negligent for a maximum security prison architect to install large plate glass windows in their cells, but having windows isn't automatically egregious. A car without windows (or with unbreakable ones) is a deathtrap in an accident; omitting them would be egregiously dangerous. 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-canada-not-affected-by-u-s-theft-issue-automakers-say-1.6252590 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.
- lupusreal 3y agoEgregious is subjective. You think it's egregious for cars to have locks which can be circumvented by thieves. Maybe I think it's egregious that construction firms don't install iron bars on all ground floor windows.
- PeterisP 3y agoIn a bunch of scenarios (mining, military, boats, planes) the vehicles explicitly don't have locks or ignition keys, you press a button and it starts up, you're good to go - should the manufacturer be liable if one gets stolen?
- rascul 3y agoUS military vehicles might have a cable that locks to the steering wheel. So if you try to drive it, you can't steer well. But if not setup properly, it can be steered just fine.
- ceejayoz 3y agoUS military vehicles are protected by the "people with guns who will shoot you" industry standard.
- adolph 3y ago> US military vehicles are protected by the "people with guns who will shoot you" industry standard. 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.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNo; each of those scenarios involves external access controls that are standard for those industries. (Fences, guards, controlled access.) It's nothing like the Kia/Hyundai scenario, where such vulnerabilities stemmed from not doing the industry standard thing (immobilizers).
- Ekaros 3y agoIsn't police the external control? It is just that governments have failed to provide enough of these controls... So maybe they should be punished collectively for it?
- Ekaros 3y agoAs long as they are regulatory compliant, there should absolutely not be any liability. If regulations are not updated fast enough maybe people responsible for that should be removed from office or punished.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> As long as they are regulatory compliant, there should absolutely not be any liability. No; willfull negligence is something that should engender liability.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- acdha 3y agoThis is true in absolute terms but over simplified because it glosses over the differences in scale. We require cars to have seatbelts because even though people still die in crashes, it’s a statistically certainty that many fewer die when seatbelts are used. 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.
- thfuran 3y ago>even if much of the cost is paid by the owners’ insurance Insurers aren't usually charities. Those costs are still borne by the insured.
- acdha 3y agoYes. That’s why I listed it first as a separate category – it’s easy to see a stolen car as a loss of, say, $20-30k for the private insurance company and owner but there’s also going to be a cost for the time the police spend investigating, the city might spend disposing of a wrecked vehicle, the courts spend processing a car thief, etc. and potentially other significant costs if, say, a Kia challenge teenager hits another person or the vehicle is used to rob a house or business. While we can’t prevent it in absolute terms, there is still a significant social benefit to reducing car theft rates.
- chankstein38 3y agoThank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised at how illogical so many of these comments are. People talking about towing cars or picking locks acting as if it's not obvious what the distinction is here. 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.
- markhahn 3y agosince there's "always another circumvention" we shouldn't even bother right? the "there are always bugs" refrain is horribly corrosive - it doesn't absolve the victim in any sense.
- chatmasta 3y agoI think the point is not that we don't regulate locks, but that we don't ban lockpicks.
- Chris2048 3y agoYou can always smash the window, but that can draw negative attention.