121–130 of 535 posts
I have an older RV that people sometimes try to steal (it's usually meth heads wanting to live on it; I've taken to leaving a plaque on the dash saying that if they want a hot meal instead, just knock on my door). The alarm is aftermarket, and silent. All it does is make the fuel pump go in reverse. (The fuel pump is also aftermarket) It's been hilarious a couple times.
I really wish there was a way to disable the panic button on my key fob. It has a hair trigger and only requires one click to activate. I regularly trigger it by bending over with my keys in my pocket.
I assume this a local cultural problem. I do not believe I have ever heard an actual car alarm go off in my life, I have only seen on television, typically in Anglo-Saxon media. So is this truly as common as the article suggests in some places?
Since I've lived in US cities, yes. Almost daily do I hear a car alarm. Probably just a factor of: 1. More cars around me in the city than in the small town I came from. 2. More things that can set off the alarms (loud motorcycles being a big one).
Now if we could just disable the feature that causes the horn to honk when locking the vehicle with the key fob... As someone who lives on a residential street, but with a hospital at the far end, we have tons of patients, families, doctors, and nurses that park on our street to avoid paying for the garage. I get to listen to horns honking at all hours. A few cars (Acura comes to mind), do a bit better, in that they…
> Car theft rates have been since declining ever since, going from about 1.6 million annual incidents in the 1990s to around 800,000 in 2014. > Cars have gotten impossible to steal I’m confused how he makes this claim given his own statistic. So are all car thefts done with sophisticated hacking given the RFID tech is 25 years old? Still seems like a problem to me.
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…
> Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that. Holy cow, US really is a bizzare place. With your level of wages and your low prices of gas, the value of the gas stolen was an equivalent of 2-4…
However, the circumstances were probably different than most gas thefts. This took place during the winter in a place known for brutally cold winters, so if you're living in your car then having gas is the difference between freezing to death or not. Apparently it was not that uncommon, the campus police seemed like they were dealing with a pattern of these kinds of thefts.
If the author had a Ring doorbell (and looked at their crime reports), or participated on NextDoor, they would know that theft from parked cars is the number one problem in most neighborhoods. An alarm is still a good deterrent for people who do not park their cars in a garage.
The best and only important deterrent is to not have anything to steal, especially in plain view. If everyone did this then theft from parked cars would drop to zero, and break-ins to near zero. Smash and grabbers don't care about alarms. They'll be gone in a few seconds anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I've lived in US cities, yes. Almost daily do I hear a car alarm. Probably just a factor of: 1. More cars around me in the city than in the small town I came from. 2. More things that can set off the alarms (loud motorcycles being a big one).
I had no idea. How do people sleep then, if this is so common?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My car only beeps if I press lock twice.
Some people think that the honk/beep is to confirm that the car got locked and the alarm got activated. So they will press the lock button until they hear the confirmation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best and only important deterrent is to not have anything to steal, especially in plain view. If everyone did this then theft from parked cars would drop to zero, and break-ins to near zero. Smash and grabbers don't care about alarms. They'll be gone in a few seconds anyway.
Right. The alarm makes them only target the easily available junk that is in plain view. With no alarm, the thief could quietly spend 30 minutes "working on" the vehicle so they could clear out your trunk, and maybe even a few parts like the radio/GPS