Why Stealing Cars Went Out of Fashion

I wish bicycle theft was tackled in a similar fashion. A combination of factors seems to be at play here: Photo ID required to sell the car and technological hurdles that are too hard to overcome for small criminals. With embedded computer chips being so cheap nowadays, surely it should be possible to embed some sort of tracking system in bicycle frames.

<i>&quot;Stealing cars is harder than it used to be, less lucrative and more likely to land you in jail. As such, people have found other things to do.&quot;</i><p>Interesting. I wonder if there are any studies on what the other things are. What do perpetrators do when the crime they specialize in no longer pays?

I did a ride-along with a cop outside of Boston about 12 years ago. His car had a laptop attached to the dashboard, an innovation that only started appearing in the 1990s. One thing that he was able to do was instantly look up the plate on a vehicle without having to radio it in -- and the lookup interfaced with what I assume was an updated database of stolen cars.<p>Another technological innovation he mentioned was the positive effect of the Lo-Jack stolen vehicle recovery system (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoJack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LoJack</a>). It not only instantly sends stolen vehicle information to police systems, but also activates a beacon on the stolen vehicle which specially equipped cruisers can detect and follow.<p>I imagine innovations such as these impacted the theft rate over the past 25 years, and also helped law enforcement agencies identify and arrest serial offenders responsible for large numbers of thefts. Didn&#x27;t see it mentioned in the NYT article, though.

Not sure it made much of a difference to insurance premiums, unless you didn&#x27;t have an immobilizer in which case you premium would go up.<p>I expect the insurance industry benefited most from this.

Why go to all the trouble of breaking into a car and then trying to start it? Sadly Detroit leads the new trend of car jacking - they even coined the term:<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/detroit-carjacking_n_5378508.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;detroit-carjacking_...</a>

That&#x27;s interesting because there&#x27;s been a rise recently in London where people plug a computer into a car to disable the alarm and start the engine..<p><a href="http://www.motors.co.uk/news/security/electronic-car-theft-on-the-rise" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motors.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;security&#x2F;electronic-car-theft-o...</a>

All these crime is down articles make me think there is something more fundamental at play. That whilst technology has helped, that perhaps the real answer is economic.<p>Crime was a way of getting something that you wanted with little effort but high risk. However with consumerism we can have what we want with medium effort and low risk. There is a lower barrier to getting what you want with anything of material worth.

Another thing the article doesn&#x27;t mention but I&#x27;ve heard is now a common (sorry, nothing to cite) way of stealing cars is to take the keys.<p>Perhaps it&#x27;s time for manufacturers to start with 2-factor authentication, perhaps the key and then a PIN that you have to enter? Is anybody doing this?

Interesting that the Honda Accord and Honda Civic are (or rather, were) the two most stolen cars. Is that because Hondas are more reliable (so there&#x27;s more old Hondas on the road) or because they&#x27;re easier to steal?

Car theifs might now be busy stealing smartphones. Easier done with better insentives maybe.

Funny - it&#x27;s pretty easy to steal new BMW&#x27;s these days!

In Dublin Ireland it&#x27;s actually getting way more popular.

Damn I need to lock up my 1996 Honda Accord!

30x less stolen cars in New York? Im sure Police car crime department got reduced in size, right?<p>RIGHT?

&#x27;You wouldn&#x27;t download a car&#x27; &lt;- hell yes I would!

Is this native advertising?<p>&gt; One of the factors that keeps car theft going in the United States is the reliability of old Hondas. Eventually, mid-1990s sedans should become too old to be worth stealing at all, but that hasn’t happened yet. “They keep running,” said Mr. Morris, and therefore they keep being stolen.