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Why Stealing Cars Went Out of Fashion
- rmason 12y agoWhy go to all the trouble of breaking into a car and then trying to start it? Sadly Detroit leads the new trend of car jacking - they even coined the term: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/detroit-carjacking_n_5378508.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/detroit-carjacking_...
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoProbably because the former used to be a relatively simple one-man job that required just a screwdriver and some basic car mechanic skills to do; the latter requires some more organisation, a truck, multiple people, etc.
- Lennington 12y agoIn Dublin Ireland it's actually getting way more popular.
- masklinn 12y agoMore popular or more visible?
- amolgupta 12y agoCar theifs might now be busy stealing smartphones. Easier done with better insentives maybe.
- robmcm 12y agoNot sure it made much of a difference to insurance premiums, unless you didn't have an immobilizer in which case you premium would go up. I expect the insurance industry benefited most from this.
- Havvy 12y agoDriving accidents that involve the destruction of multiple cars, damage to humans, and possible law suits far outweigh the damage caused by theft.
- graeme 12y agoI don't know why you're only considering insurance premiums. Surely, people benefit from not having their car stolen. It's a lot of work to replace a car, even if insurance pays.
- Chronic29 12y agoAnd the "lot(s) of work to replace a car" can be offset by a large enough insurance payment.
- alec_heif 12y agoInteresting that the Honda Accord and Honda Civic are (or rather, were) the two most stolen cars. Is that because Hondas are more reliable (so there's more old Hondas on the road) or because they're easier to steal?
- AmVess 12y agoThey are stolen for the marketability of their parts.
- nyrina 12y agoThat still begs the question. Why are their parts better?
- dspillett 12y agoNot better as such, but have more value due to higher demand. Both cars have sold well so there are more out there that need repair from time to time and there are other models out there with the same (or compatible) parts, not just other civic/accord variants. The age of a model can make a difference too when breaking for parts: newer cars will be covered by warranty, those not long past warranty are likely to be more reliable than those a couple of years older. After a few more years the value drops off because people will start to replace more than repair, so demand for parts falls.
- comrade1 12y agoAre you saying that they're stolen for the marketability of their parts because there are more that are stolen?
- yason 12y agoThe marketability of their parts means that there are a lot of legally-owned Hondas which, of course, need parts replaced at times. And because everyone knows there are a lot of Hondas, the owners know it's easy to find a second-hand part from a junkyard or ebay to save money and thus for Hondas there exists a particularly lively market for old parts. I always buy second-hand parts whenever it makes sense. It doesn't work that well with less popular cars, obviously. Either there aren't second-hand replacements that are easy to find or they're still too expensive (because of said scarcity...) so it makes sense to buy a new replacement part with warranty.
- kalleboo 12y agoIs this native advertising? > One of the factors that keeps car theft going in the United States is the reliability of old Hondas. Eventually, mid-1990s sedans should become too old to be worth stealing at all, but that hasn’t happened yet. “They keep running,” said Mr. Morris, and therefore they keep being stolen.
- petercooper 12y agoNo. The New York Times make native advertising very clear. For example: http://paidpost.nytimes.com/netflix/women-inmates-separate-but-not-equal.html http://paidpost.nytimes.com/netflix/women-inmates-separate-b... A special "paidpost" subdomain, "PAID POST" at the top of the page, and the name of the sponsor is stickied to the top as you scroll. Namedropping a company into a story (which is almost certainly not happening here) would be payola or product placement neither of which are anything like native advertising.
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoTo be honest, "our cars are very reliable but they're likely to get stolen" isn't very good advertising, :p.
- Ma8ee 12y agoBut "our cars are very reliable and no longer very likely to get stolen" is.
- praptak 12y ago"Stealing cars is harder than it used to be, less lucrative and more likely to land you in jail. As such, people have found other things to do." Interesting. I wonder if there are any studies on what the other things are. What do perpetrators do when the crime they specialize in no longer pays?
- antocv 12y agoSending spam and scam mails?
- baddox 12y agoI doubt most people desire being a criminal as an end in itself. Presumably car thieves either went onto the next best job, whether that be a crime (where "best" considers costs, like the risk of being punished, and benefits), or a legal job.
- lmm 12y agoOr stayed at home and claimed unemployment, if the marginal gain from working ceased to be worth the cost.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- riffraff 12y agomaybe it's not much that people change jobs as much as new people that don't pick up the trade? I.e. you never start stealing cars cause it doesn't seem as lucrative and is riskier than just selling drugs.
- adventured 12y agoMost types of crime have declined meaningfully in the last 25 years. The only segment I can think of that might have picked up some of those former car thieves, would be the drug trade (from pot to pharmaceuticals), as it did not see a decline.
- leonhandreke 12y agoI wish bicycle theft was tackled in a similar fashion. A combination of factors seems to be at play here: Photo ID required to sell the car and technological hurdles that are too hard to overcome for small criminals. With embedded computer chips being so cheap nowadays, surely it should be possible to embed some sort of tracking system in bicycle frames.
- da02 12y agoJust out of curiosity, what town or city do you live in? How many times has it happened to you?
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoIn the Netherlands / Amsterdam it happens all the time - to be fair, people have adjusted to it, all you see is very cheap old bicycles, and it's not uncommon to just steal someone else's bike if your own gets stolen. I read a cute news bulletin from the police the other day that they arrested a 60-some year old bike thief using a 'lure bike'. They do that regularly actually: https://www.google.com/search?q=lokfiets+site:politie.nl https://www.google.com/search?q=lokfiets+site:politie.nl Ahem. Anyway, point is, over here we adjusted by not owning expensive bicycles for the daily commute, so that's another way to deal with it.
- rectangletangle 12y agoIf anything Amsterdam probably has too many bikes. They're literally covering every surface that you can lock one on to, often several layers deep. They're almost like barnacles there. This is exacerbated by the old infrastructure that isn't quite up to par with cities like Rotterdam.
- digitalengineer 12y agoWell yeah Rotterdam had the heart bombed out of it in WW2. So no more narrow streets downtown.
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- f00644 12y ago'You wouldn't download a car' <- hell yes I would!
- grahamel 12y agoThat's interesting because there's been a rise recently in London where people plug a computer into a car to disable the alarm and start the engine.. http://www.motors.co.uk/news/security/electronic-car-theft-on-the-rise http://www.motors.co.uk/news/security/electronic-car-theft-o...
- mike_hearn 12y agoImmobilisers have absolutely slaughtered car theft (this is not news, I referenced this trend in a talk I gave a couple of years ago), but this makes them VERY vulnerable to being hacked. What's more most immobiliser systems are poorly engineered from a cryptographic perspective, for example, some can be overridden by simply telling the ECU to start up via a plugin cable, others are simply broadcasting static repeating codes meaning you can gather the codes with a fixed receiver in a car park and then go collect them later. When a sufficiently smart criminal starts making kits that let you hack immobilisers, theft of those models shoots up dramatically. BMW has suffered from this effect badly. Their engine security sucked and owners became magnets for car theft.
- ilamont 12y agoI did a ride-along with a cop outside of Boston about 12 years ago. His car had a laptop attached to the dashboard, an innovation that only started appearing in the 1990s. One thing that he was able to do was instantly look up the plate on a vehicle without having to radio it in -- and the lookup interfaced with what I assume was an updated database of stolen cars. Another technological innovation he mentioned was the positive effect of the Lo-Jack stolen vehicle recovery system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoJack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoJack). It not only instantly sends stolen vehicle information to police systems, but also activates a beacon on the stolen vehicle which specially equipped cruisers can detect and follow. I imagine innovations such as these impacted the theft rate over the past 25 years, and also helped law enforcement agencies identify and arrest serial offenders responsible for large numbers of thefts. Didn't see it mentioned in the NYT article, though.
- rmc 12y agoI believe police cars in the UK have cameras with automatic number plate recognition. They drive around and it scans for stolen/uninsured cars.
- jzwinck 12y agoLikewise in America and elsewhere: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/your-car-tracked-the-rapid-rise-of-license-plate-readers/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/your-car-tracked-...
- rasz_pl 12y ago30x less stolen cars in New York? Im sure Police car crime department got reduced in size, right? RIGHT?
- Piskvorrr 12y agoDidn't actually read the article, did you? "And the decline in thefts has freed up the 85 detectives and supervisors of New York’s auto crime division to focus on stopping organized car theft rings, the sorts of operations that actually have the ability to make coded keys for newer cars."
- shutupalready 12y agoSo those 85 detectives and supervisors, formerly working on auto crime, now work on auto crime -- a subset of auto crime to be precise. The grandparent's comment has merit. Government has stayed exactly the same size.
- Piskvorrr 12y ago...while working on something with larger impact, apparently. Is the size of the government the only indicator of efficiency?
- PeterisP 12y agoThe point is that if previously they had, say, 85 people with 30 working on organized car theft rings and 55 on random single thefts; then a reasonable result of a tenfold decrease in random thefts would NOT be 80 people on organized car theft rings and 5 on random single thefts but instead 40 on the organized crime (if it has increased), 5 on the random thefts, and 40 people moved away from the car crime, either to something different within the police or laid off to make budget for other useful things such as medicine or public transportation. Demand for various niches of gov't service will change, that's a given. When it's not enough, bad stuff is visible, voters complain and service gets increased. What happens when the demand falls, as it has in this case? We need an ability to reduce the size as well.
- amalag 12y agoDamn I need to lock up my 1996 Honda Accord!
- dutchbrit 12y agoFunny - it's pretty easy to steal new BMW's these days!
- nextw33k 12y agoAll these crime is down articles make me think there is something more fundamental at play. That whilst technology has helped, that perhaps the real answer is economic. Crime was a way of getting something that you wanted with little effort but high risk. However with consumerism we can have what we want with medium effort and low risk. There is a lower barrier to getting what you want with anything of material worth.
- kstenerud 12y agoLead was a major contributing factor. http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-ca...
- alexhawdon 12y agoAnother thing the article doesn't mention but I've heard is now a common (sorry, nothing to cite) way of stealing cars is to take the keys. Perhaps it's time for manufacturers to start with 2-factor authentication, perhaps the key and then a PIN that you have to enter? Is anybody doing this?
- codfrantic 12y agoI remember an aftermarket immobiliser which required a PIN to be entered, this was in the Netherlands in the 1990's though, haven't seen it since...