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Winnipeg Demands Immobilizers on High-Risk Cars
mytrip writes with a Reuters article about a new, unusual insurance requirement for drivers in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Apparently Winnipeg is one of the worst cities in Canada for auto thefts. New and 'high-risk' cars will now be required to install an electronic immobilizers in order to qualify for car insurance. "Chomiak said cars are stolen twice as often in Winnipeg as in other Manitoba cities, while a 2005 report from Statistics Canada said the city had a higher per-capita car theft rate than larger cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. The province, where cars are insured through Manitoba Public Insurance, will fork over C$15 million ($14 million) so that owners without immobilizers can have them installed."
How can this not be a requirement? In Australia it's been that way for ages, and all new cars have to have immobilizers fitted.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Yes, you might be able to hack around the immobilizer. However, you'd need some hardware and knowledge to do that. It raises the barrier of entry, so less cars will get stolen (that's all the insurer cares about).
What kind of an idiot is willing to pay however much per year to insure their car, but not willing to pay a measly $80 once-off for an immobiliser?
Plus, I'd much rather have my car not stolen than have an insurance company give me money when it is stolen. Especially considering the headache you have to go through in order to get it.
the vast majority of theifts are punks stealing a car for a joy ride, they aren't bright enough or organised enough to have a laptop on hand to hack the cars electrical systems.
the only cars that might be targeted by professional gangs would be expensive or hard to get cars they can resell, and if you have one of those then you've most likely got state of the art alarms anyway.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
How difficult would it be to bypass the immobilizer
presumablely harder than smashing the window and hot-wiring it.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
In fact, for profit insurance is stuck in a fundamental conflict of interest; they will be most successful by finding ways to weasel out of their obligations. Government insurance, on the other hand, is beholden to the voters, and doesn't embezzle premiums off into profit. Further, it greatly simplifies the system. If there's an accident, there's only one party to make payments, not 2 or more who will fight about who should pay what percent.
A well regulated market has many useful places in society, but financial services is not one of them.
Put immobilizers on the kids. It's called "jail".
Most of the stuff on
From the UK 'Home Office', "Since 1997, vehicle crime has fallen by 51%. Despite this, according to the British Crime Survey there were 1,731,000 vehicle crimes during 2005-06".
The downside is that if you have a high-value car, criminals now either break into your house to get the keys, or hijack you. My brother-in-law used to drive an Audi RS4, (with the BMW M5, the vehicle of choice for bank and smash and grab crimes). After the SECOND time he and his wife were threatened with knives and beaten, (in the centre of a major city each time), he replaced it with something rather more modest...
To address one of your comments - Manitoba Public Insurance pays the entire cost of the immobilizer, and provides a discount on your premium once you have it installed. Also, it seems that most of the vehicle theft here in Winnipeg is by youth taking the cars on joyrides, so the electronic bypass methods are probably not a big issue. And Winnipeg is FAR from any other major cities (Minneapolis is the closest large city - almost 800 kms away!) so I don't think thieves are going to be going cross-border as a result.
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All old (non-diesel) cars had engine immobilizers. You popped the top off the distributor cap and took the rotor arm out. How many joy riders carried a selection of spare parts with them? Ah, the joy of analogue tech.
Immobilisers have been a legal requirement for all cars in the UK for nearly 10 years now. Generally, they're the "microchip in the ignition key" type you describe.
And no, they're not impossible to work around - otherwise anytime someone lost their keys they'd have to write off their car - but they involve more work than your average teenage joyrider is prepared to put in.
This has led to a number of alternate attack vectors being used for car theft:
1. Steal the keys first then the car from the owners driveway. Easy enough if they leave the keys in a bowl by the front door.
2. Carjacking. (Oh wonderful, we've replaced the essentially non-violent crime of car theft with the rather more violent crime of carjacking)
3. Steal an older car.
You occasionally hear of more sophisticated things going on - like showing up in an official-looking tow truck and lifting the vehicle, with a view to sorting out "how to start the damn thing" at leisure - but that's pretty rare.
Here's the top-ten list of most stolen cars in the USA for 2005:
- 1991 Honda Accord
- 1995 Honda Civic
- 1989 Toyota Camry
- 1994 Dodge Caravan
- 1994 Nissan Sentra
- 1997 Ford F150 Series
- 1990 Acura Integra
- 1986 Toyota Pickup
- 1993 Saturn SL
- 2004 Dodge Ram Pickup
Professional car theft is ALL about the used-parts markets - stolen cars invariable end up in chop shops and sold for parts. The biggest market for car parts isn't going to be high-end one in a million models, it is the mom and pop with a million on the road models.When information is power, privacy is freedom.