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Comment by neuralRiot | Hacker News Reader

Car thieves don’t go out to program new keys on the cars the want to steal, they just lift them with a tow truck. Quick, easy and nobody suspects anything.

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Here in Chile (southamerica) they will block the road, put a gun on your forehead and shoot if you dont get out.

Does stealing a car without threatening violence have a lower penalty if you get caught? Ive always wondered why you get pickpockets in Europe and muggings in the US

I suspect severity of sentences has less impact than availability of handguns; much harder to get them in Europe.

Who said anything about guns? Knives or pipes are plenty common, and in some cities its simple overwhelming numerical superiority. One friend told me of being mugged by ten or so adolescents who were not fully grown or armed. But apparently quantity has a quality all its own. Another friend was in Madrid when pickpocketed, and ran down the thief and used force to retrieve it. He was later told by locals that if he had been seen by law enforcement his penalty would have been much more severe than the thief's. That is all amecdata, but something cultural or something in policy seems a more likely culprit. Some south american cities have pretty tight gun laws too don't they?

Some South American areas have an awful lot of guns. An ESL student from Colombia told me that he feels a lot safer in the US.

In the USA, the answer is generally, yes. Using a gun to commit a crime can add 5, 10, 20 years to the crime. For instance, murder in Illinois is a 20-year minimum sentence, but 45 year minimum if committed with a gun.

That is assuming murders get caught, convicted and sentenced.

"Among the nation's largest cities, Chicago stands out for both its high murder rate and for the number of its murders that go unsolved. In recent years the police have been solving about 4 of every 10 murders in the city, but police data show the rate is even worse when the victim is African American."

See https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/10/09/768552458/chicago-s...

I agree that diagnostic-port reprogramming at the point of theft is uncommon (although absolutely not unheard of).

I'm not sure what the effect of that observation is, though - key and immobilizer security is extremely important still, because cars which are stolen by any mechanism (tow, stolen key, transponder relay, etc) then need to be resold or broken down for parts. Especially in Europe where control module security is generally both more robust and more insurance regulated, many parts on a stolen vehicle are increasingly not valuable unless the immobilizer / key enrollment system can be bypassed.

This has the added advantage that once the front of the car is lifted past a certain point the car assumes it's being legitimately towed and disables its alarm...

Unless the victim has a GPS tracker installed on the vehicle.

But that would track any kind of theft. Most cars do not have that kind of tracking built-in and I would guess that most new cars don't have it either. If you could get the car into a shipping container asap, it might be enough shielding to block GPS or the cell signal for tracking the car and then it's off to some other country where the SIM card won't work before cops could catch up.

Most new cars do have GPS and cellular built in, at least in the US.

For example, here they market it as a way to find where you parked: https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/fordpass/getting-starte...

Some trackers use roaming SIM chips like 1NCE. The thief could also use a jammer or a conductive cloak. A shipping container is kind of a stretch.

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