Satellites Used to Stop Car Thieves in Pakistan

zymurgy_cat writes "Yahoo has an interesting story about a company in Pakistan that uses satellites and mobile phone networks to monitor and disable stolen cars. Looks like they can also monitor people's driving habits and whether or not they're using the air conditioner. The article comments about how much easier it is for them to do things like disabling cars remotely than in Western countries. (Remind me to never rent a car in Pakistan.)"

Comments

Onstar anyone?

[ajohnj1]

Onstar has had these capabilities in most GM equipped cars for quite some time now. They use the tracking abilities for catching car thieves, they use Onstar to unlock car doors if you lock your keys in the car, they also have the ability to monitor or change any of the guages in the car as well. Whether they use all of the technology or not is another question, but the technology is in the US already.

This is done in Brazil for about 8 years for cars

[aod7br]

There are several companys in Brazil doing the same, using GPS, satellites and cel phones. It has been done for eight years for cargo trucks and 3 years ago for cars.

Yay for nobody reading the article.

[DrEldarion]

Try reading the article next time, people. There is no rights violation going on here. This is something people CHOOSE to have installed in their car and actually PAY for the service. It's not like it's automatically placed in every car so that they can watch you wherever you go.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Re:This has been available in Australia for years.

[B747SP]

Aussie cops must not have such great equipment.

For whatever reason, no, they don't. I see a lot of stuff about US State cops kitting themselves out with proceeds from crime, etc, etc. That doesn't happen here - proceeds from crime go straight back into gummint coffers.

At various times they have dabbled with whatever was the latest/greatest/fastest. 10-15 years ago, when the Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo was the dogs nuts of fast small cars, the police in my state (NSW) got a few of them and let the Highway Patrol group use them. Apparently the Cordia went fast in a straight line, but couldn't go around corners particularly well. They quietly and quickly dissapeared.

More recently, the aforementioned Subaru Impreza WRX made an appearance. I saw a couple of those painted up in police colours in active use just a few years ago. Again, they have quietly dissapeared from the scene, dunno why.

Somehow, I always picture them having souped-up V8's with 'INTERCEPTOR' printed on the back...

Well, you're close-ish to the truth. NSW police have pretty much always had the Holden Commodore and/or the Ford Falcon (sorry, lots of evil javascript and flash there, couldn't find an alternative) de jour. They're low quality, fuel guzzling Australian built hunks-o-junk, but the manufacturers have probably backed the government into a support-local-industry corner, and they're probably only paying three-fiddy apiece for them (that's all they're worth!!!).

Both of those cars have a V8 in the model range, and I think the Highway Patrol at least get V8s. Most of the common-or-garden police cars I see around at the moment seem to be Holden Commodores, but Ford have an 'SV6' and 'SV8' model, gofasta ones that they're using in some police applications. No "Intruders" tho!

Here, I googled, and found a few pictures...

This is a pretty standard NSW Police card right now. (a holden commondoor)

This is an example of a Subaru Impreza WRX in NSW Police colours...

An old Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo

They just keep going back to Commodores and Falcons though...