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Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

popularmechanics.com

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Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#41

Post by Topgamer7 »

svachalek wrote: post #16

Last time I got car insurance (a year ago?) I believe they still asked if it had an alarm, implying they still give a discount for it. Do insurance companies think it actually matters? Or do they just get kickbacks from alarm companies?

Insurance companies are in theory statistics companies. They collect data on data points to infer where cost savings can be.

Although in practice they are money making companies, and likely use statistics to find ways to upsell you.

So once upon a time car alarms were rarer, and they could charge more if you didn't have one.

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#42

Post by lotsofpulp »

vangelis wrote: post #12
u801e wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car. That really depends if you're close enough to the car, or in a building that makes it easy to hear noises coming from a parking lot. If I go to a mall or a big box store, I'm not going to hear my car alarm going off and other people are going to largely ignore…

99% of car alarms from my experience are either people backing into cars, false alarms, or in my case, my truck being a POS because I had a key but not a key fob.

It’s 100% in my experience. I don’t think anyone I know would hear a car alarm and think someone is stealing a car. They would ignore it if it isn’t their alarm, cussing out the owner of the car for causing a disturbance, or cuss themselves out for accidentally hitting the button on the remote.

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#43

Post by amalcon »

ryanmercer wrote: post #3

If you have your car at the mall or are in a big city parking garge, sure it doesn't do much. If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car. My town has a population a little over 300 people, we have one resident that is... not well... that rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter and pounds on peo…

I've owned a car in a city, a high density suburb, and a low density suburb (all USA). I had the one non-alarmed car as a teenager in the low density suburb. It was broken into in the quiet residential driveway. In the city and the high density suburb, I have only ever had false alarms.

Maybe the answer is to give the user the option to arm the alarm or not when exiting, with equal friction (i.e. separate "lock" and "lock+arm" buttons on both the door and the fob).

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#44

Post by sparrish »

josefresco wrote: post #2

I'd rather see a tracking system attached to several parts of the vehicle. This would allow law enforcement to track the vehicle, and/or the parts if the vehicle is broken down and sold. In the United States we have "LoJack" but it's not a standard feature rather a dealer upsell.

Which can all be defeated by the car thief carrying a $100 box that blocks all kinds of wireless signals (GPS, LoJack, 4G, etc)

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#45

Post by lotsofpulp »

mumblemumble wrote: post #37
dont__panic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so parked Teslas always record videos of me when I walk by? That does not sound legal in quite a few places.

In the USA, as long as you're not recording audio and it's not in a place where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy, clandestine video surveillance is A-OK.

I don’t know why cars don’t come with built in dash cams yet. Seems like there is huge demand for it.

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#46

Post by burnthrow »

ryanmercer wrote: post #3

If you have your car at the mall or are in a big city parking garge, sure it doesn't do much. If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car. My town has a population a little over 300 people, we have one resident that is... not well... that rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter and pounds on peo…

> rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter

That maniac!

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#47

Post by andai »

harperlee wrote: post #29
aronpye wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re in a public place, have no reasonable expectation to privacy, and the recording is not intrusive, so perfectly legal.

At least in Spain* it does not work like that, there are very stringent limitations on what you can record on the street, e.g. through dashcams or tesla sentinel mode: https://www.aepd.es/sites/default/files/2019-09/informe-juri... For example, you can't use dashcam recordings of an accident in trial. * And I don't want to spend a bunch of time reading law but quite sure this is very tied in with GDPR, so I'd say tha…

> you can't use dashcam recordings of an accident in trial.

Doesn't this entirely defeat the purpose of having a dashcam?

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#49

Post by andai »

switch007 wrote: post #22
psmithsfhn wrote: post #20

better, why do they still make car horns?

To alert other people about your presence. What would you do if a car was reversing and it looked highly probably they are going to hit you? Or when driving round blind bends on single track roads? It has very valid use cases, it just happens to be abused by idiots quite often

Ah.. so the real question is, why do they still make idiots?

Re: Why do they still make car alarms? (2015)

#50

Post by fred_is_fred »

Triv888 wrote: post #40
psmithsfhn wrote: post #20

better, why do they still make car horns?

One problem with car horn is the cars that beep it every time you lock your doors...

Almost every car that has the ability to disable this, including my 2004 Subaru. The method was strange and complicated but it did work.
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