I’m sorry I’ve not updated this for yonks. So here is a post. Please buy my book!
My story in this week’s issue of The Economist is about a lawsuit that the city of Chicago has filed against Kia and Hyundai, two Korean car manufacturers, for selling vehicles without immobilisers fitted. This makes them terrifically easy to steal. An immobiliser works generally by putting a break in the circuits that power the ignition switch and the pump that moves fuel into the engine. The immobiliser only completes the circuits when it detects a code—usually a cryptographic radio signal from the large plastic fob your car key is attached to. Without the fob, you cannot start the car.
Immobilisers have been fitted as standard in all new cars Europe since 1998. I was baffled to discover that in fact, it is not a legal requirement to fit them in the United States. But the vast majority of new cars sold here do have them. The spread of immobilisers are a large part of the reason why car theft rates collapsed on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 1990s. When it became harder to simply break into a car and drive it away, lots of potential car thieves stopped trying.
In the piece I write about why rising car theft numbers is a potentially really big problem. The thing to be really worried about is that many of the young thieves now stealing vehicles are getting their first taste of the joy of crime. There is some good academic evidence that suggests stealing cars for a joyride is a sort of gateway drug into other criminal activities.
But it is worth noting that immobilisers make it harder, but far from impossible, to steal a car. And car theft is rising even where they are universally fitted. In Britain, 130,000 or so vehicles were stolen last year. That was up almost a third on the year before. All British cars, in line with the European requirements from 1998, have immobilisers.
So what accounts for the rise, if not a lack of immobilisers? Part of it is a rise in burglaries of homes to steal keys and drive the cars off. Part though is the rise of technology that can circumvent the immobilisers. Thieves use targeted listening devices to clone or extend the radio signal that the key sends (so they can drive your car off your driveway using the signal from the key fob inside your house). These days, many cars do not actually require a physical key to be turned in a lock to start, so if you can clone the fob, you can start the car without even having to hotwire it to bypass the key.
And how does this relate to my book, about why cars suck? Well, I can’t help but see a pattern. As I write in the chapter about the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal, car manufacturing is insanely competitive. Especially at the bottom end of the market, saving a few hundred dollars per car in costs is the difference between a thriving firm or a struggling one. That was ultimately why Volkswagen cheated on emissions tests—to save a few hundred dollars on catalyctic converters. And so it is with the immobilisers and other anti-theft technology I imagine.
Looked at like that, it seems inevitable that car theft would eventually rise again. In the 1990s, my dad used to drive around with a bright yellow steering wheel lock in the car and carefully fit it whenever we parked. But at a certain point in the early noughties, he decided he didn’t need it any more. Car theft ceased to be a thing that worried most people. As it became rare, for manufacturers, it was easy to skimp on the devices that stopped it. More than easy actually—it was profitable. But thieves of course are also developing new technology. Nowadays I see steering wheel locks are back and people are nervous again. So probably manufacturers will find new, clever anti-theft tools and promote them a lot. But what else might they be skimping on that we are not worrying about now?