OK uptil now I have not bothered to get an aftermarket alarm in my car. All I have is LOJACK but now that I think about it - if someone did steal my car, I would probably not want it back.

I have looked at many pricey alarms with motion sensors and the works - but a lot of people have told me that professional thieves can disable almost everything you throw at them.

I do have a specific question though - does our immobilizer prevent hot-wiring. In other words, does the immobilizer have any useful function at all or can anyone just rip of the panel and hotwire the car? Or do you need to have a key with the immobilizer chip in it to start the car?

 

The design of the Immobilizer is to prevent the car from being hot-wired. There is a chip in your key, that matches up with the alarm system. The only way (supposedly) the car can be started is with a key that has the chip with it's digital fingerprint (I don't know what they really call it). Yes, there are probably ways to get around this, but the system seems to work decently well. Nothing is fool-proof.

 

The immobilizer disables power to the fuel pump unless your preconfigured key (with imbedded chip) is inserted into the ignition and read by the immobilizer's sensor next to the ignition. With a little knowledge of our immobilizer system and/or the Helm Electrical Troubleshooting manual, the immobilizer is easily defeated.

 

How? I doesn't look all that easy to me. Granted they can always just lift the whole car and worry about starting it later.

 

Shall I post it?!?

 

Please NO

 

I've not read the manual myself, but I'd bet defeating the Immobilizer simply requires faking out the signal that the detector normally sends to the fuel pump.

The point is the system will stop amateur and/or stupid car thieves, but it will only slow down someone who really wants your car.

There is a tenet of computer security: to make something 10x more secure, it will cost 10x as much. Perfect security is impossible, since you don't have infinite money. There will always be someone who can break in, if they have the resources to do it.

TXR

 

We are talking about car thieves and a 30K car.. the punk retrieving the merchandise is not all that clever, the car is not worth all that much, and the demand in the secondary market is not that high. If it is not something that is done quickly in the dark it is not going to happen very often.

From what I understand cars stolen fall into three categories, 1) for parts (chop shops), 2) expensive cars in demand that are given a new ID, or sent overseas (demand for high content SUVs), and 3) dumb street crime.

My guess is that our cars would attract attention only by group 3 where clever does not come into play.

Don't post anything that makes you uncomfortable.

 

Have there been any reported thefts of s2ks in the United States?

I read the post about the s2k stolen in Hong Kong, but haven't heard of anything here.

 

The same immobilizer system prevented the hot-wiring of my wife's Integra last year. They had the steering column apart and it looks like they worked at it for a while.

They wound up just stealing the front seats, center console, shift knob, and a few other parts.

Ted