Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Car thieves could be stopped remotely

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 18:19:03 -0500

Car thieves could be stopped remotely
19:00 18 February 04

Speeding off in a stolen car, the thief thinks he has got a great catch.
But he is in for a nasty surprise. The car is fitted with a
remote immobiliser, and a radio signal from a control centre miles away
will ensure that once the thief switches the engine off,
he will not be able to start it again.

For now, such devices are only available for fleets of trucks and
specialist vehicles used on construction sites. But remote
immobilisation technology could soon start to trickle down to ordinary
cars, and should be available in the UK in two months.
The idea goes like this. A control box fitted to the car incorporates a
miniature cellphone, a microprocessor and memory, and a
GPS satellite positioning receiver. If the car is stolen, a coded
cellphone signal will tell the unit to block the vehicle's engine
management system and prevent the engine being restarted.

There are even plans for immobilisers that shut down vehicles on the
move, though there are fears over the safety implications of such a
system.

Hot-wiring

In the UK, an array of technical fixes is already making life harder for
car thieves. "The pattern of vehicle crime has changed," says Martyn
Randall of Thatcham, a security research organisation based in Berkshire
that is funded in part by the motor insurance industry.

He says it would only take him a few minutes to teach a novice how to
steal a car, using a bare minimum of tools. But only if the car is more
than 10 years old.

Modern cars are a far tougher proposition, as their engine management
computer will not allow them to start unless they receive
a unique ID code beamed out by the ignition key or key fob. Ripping out
the lock and "hot-wiring" the ignition is no longer an
option. In the UK, technologies like this have helped achieve a 31 per
cent drop in vehicle-related crime since 1997 (see
graphic).

Stolen keys

But determined criminals are still managing to find other ways to steal
cars, often by getting hold of the owner's keys in a
burglary, or by hijacking the car. In 2002, 12 per cent of vehicles
stolen in the UK were taken using the owner's keys double the previous
year's figure.

According to the UK company Tracker Network of Uxbridge, Middlesex,
which supplies locating devices for top-of-the-range cars, key theft is
responsible for 40 per cent of the thefts of vehicles fitted with its
tracking system.
Remote-controlled immobilisation systems would put a major new obstacle
in the criminal's way by making such thefts pointless.

A group that includes Thatcham, the police, insurance companies and
security technology firms have developed standards for a
system that could go on the market as early as April 2004.

If the car travels a hundred metres without the driver confirming their
ID, perhaps by keying a PIN into a keypad, the system will send a signal
to an operations centre that it has been stolen. The hundred metres
minimum avoids false alarms due to inaccuracies in the GPS signal.

Staff at the centre will then contact the owner to confirm that the car
really is missing, and keep police informed of the vehicle's
movements via the car's GPS unit. When the car is parked safely (you
would not immobilise it on a busy road), the operations
centre will send a signal activating the immobiliser. It will then only
be possible to start the engine if the unit has received a
second, "de-immobilise" signal.

Fear of litigation
Clearly, turning a car into an immovable obstruction could be a danger
to other road users. To try and limit this, and the
potential legal issue of blocking a highway, only the operations centre
will be able to shut the car down.

In the US, fear of litigation is discouraging the whole idea of using
remote immobilisers: no one wants to be responsible for, say,
blocking ambulance access. Vetronix of Santa Barbara, California, offers
a tracking system for company car fleets. But a
spokesman for the firm, Jack Rozint, says remote immobilisers are rarely
fitted due to customers' liability worries.
However, Mike Langley of Box Telematics, a UK company based in the West
Midlands, believes legal liability is unlikely to be a major issue. He
says that though his company has fitted remote immobilisers to several
thousand commercial vehicles, it has
only had to shut down stolen vehicles on public roads three times.
James Randerson

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994697

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