BMW Traps A Car Thief By Remotely Locking His Doors (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Seattle police caught an alleged car thief by enlisting the help of car maker BMW to both track and then remotely lock the luckless criminal in the very car he was trying to steal... Turns out if you're inside a stolen car, it's perhaps not the best time to take a nap. "A car thief awoke from a sound slumber Sunday morning (November 27) to find he had been remotely locked inside a stolen BMW, just as Seattle police officers were bearing down on him," wrote Jonah Spangenthal-Lee [deputy director of communications for the Seattle Police Department].

The suspect found a key fob mistakenly left inside the BMW by a friend who'd borrowed the car from the owner and the alleged crime was on. But technology triumphed. When the owner, who'd just gotten married a day earlier, discovered the theft, the police contacted BMW corporate, who tracked the car to Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood.
The 38-year-old inside was then booked for both auto theft and possession of methamphetamine.

Comments

What danger ?

[DrYak]

In an emergency, you're supposed to be able to break a car's side windows.

I supposed the "sun-cooked" guy had passed out (alcohol ? heat shock, while he was asleep ?) before realising he should get out of the car.

I'm more surprised that the thief didn't try to break out of the car. But, on the other hand the lock has happened while he was napping inside the car, so he might not have realised what had happened and did not release he should run away as fast as possible before the police arrives.

I would be much more worried about the remote disabling of the car :
- was some form of owner's access required in order to do the disabling ? (i.e.: the owner's second fob is needed in order to validate the instruction to lock and ignore the stolen fob ?)
- or does any sufficiently high executive at BMW have the power to shut down any random car ?

Also : is the remote access limited to very simple instruction (locking doors and revoking fobs - which as mentioned above shouldn't be dangerous except under special circumstances) or can the car be remotely shut down while it is driving ?

Re:I call bullshit.

[Zocalo]

The article is light on details as to how the emergency unlock got overridden - maybe the guy was just high and was tricked, but maybe BMW's double-pull safety/security feature gave them a window of opportunity that let them do this. If BMW were repeatedly sending the central lock signal to the car at a faster rate than the recently woken (and potentially also doped up) thief could do the double-pull, then perhaps that would be enough to keep the doors locked. We also have no idea from TFA how long they kept the doors locked for; it might only have been a few minutes, or possibly even less than that. It's entirely possible it was less than the time that the recently woken thief would have taken to gather hits wits and try something else like, say, opening/breaking a window and climbing out.