Hyundai, Kia to update security on millions of vehicles after TikTok challenge | Hacker News Reader

Hyundai, Kia to update security on millions of vehicles after TikTok challenge

theverge.com

181 pointsgwill143 comments

The headline on the site is a bit misleading. It's not "because of viral TikTok challenge", it's because the software and physical ignition interface is, in fact, totally broken:

"The thefts are reportedly easy to pull off because many 2015-2019 Hyundai and Kia vehicles lack electronic immobilizers that prevent thieves from simply breaking in and bypassing the ignition. The feature is standard equipment on nearly all vehicles from the same period made by other manufacturers."

And from: https://www.hotcars.com/kia-boyz-easily-steal-base-kia-hyund...

"Based on research conducted by Donut Media, we see that stealing a Hyundai or a Kia model produced between 2011 and 2021 is astonishingly simple. Folks at Donut Media started this research with a regular screwdriver and a USB cable. They start by unscrewing the steering column case and exposing the wires and the ignition cylinder. Once they pull out the ignition cylinder, they find a twist lever that fits perfectly into the slot of a USB-A cable. Once they connect their spare USB Type-A to the ignition cylinder male port, they rotate the unit in a clockwise motion to find the car starting without a proper car key. "

This is like saying that movies in the 1980s sparked a rash of car thefts because they showed people hotwiring cars all the time.

I could see an argument that the "viral challenge" is forcing them to change it. The manufacturers were aware of the problem, and doing the absolute minimum to address it. They were giving out steering wheel locks and offering to do a software fix for anywhere between $170 and $500. The issue spread through the "tiktok challenge" and that's forced them to make a move toward helping customers.

I guess it’s more like “companies forced to fix known flaw pointed out in viral TikTok trend” or something.

That's spot on. But the question for The Verge is, would you click on that headline?

I mean, yeah? That's actually still an interesting phenomenon that combines multiple hot button/trending things. I think in this case a more accurate headline is actually still plenty clickable. They simply didn't do a great job on the wording this time. It happens.

Or is it a paid story, with tiktok struggling to stay in the US, and this is a "tiktok good for all" story?

Trick question, I would not click on a link to The Verge.

Why not? From a tech journalism perspective, I find them as useful as any other news site.

I’m genuinely curious why you don’t like them

Is it really that different from the current headline?

The current headline suggests that TikTok is the reason for the update. At first I thought this was due to a software change in some tiktok app or something. But the reason for the change is the flaw, and tiktok users are merely calling attention to the existing flaw.

They went for years without fixing the flaw. Only TikTok exposing the flaw widely caused enough outcry to make them change.

It's like how it often takes public shaming on twitter to get a company to act like they should have done in the first place. It's not social media that causes the problem, it's just that the continuous bad "press" makes it inconvenient enough that a company might expend some meaningful effort into addressing their issue for a change.

I don't think a lot of companies really care about their reputation or about public perception. Some of the most hated companies on Earth continue to be enormously successful and shitty, but with enough attention over a long enough period of time and they'll often do something to make people shut up about their bad behavior on social media so that we'll move on to the next distraction and they can go back to being terrible.

My best friend is a KIA mechanic. Says they've known about this for a long time and simply refused to update it - which he said would be super easy to do a recall and have them simply put in the engine immobilizer.

I think you're right though. They tried ignoring the problem until it popped up on social media and cities have see huge increases in thefts for both Kia's and Hyundai's ever since.

AFAIK the real kick in their ass to finally get this going is insurance companies like State Farm refusing to insure their vehicles on a state by state basis.[1]

I own a 2020 Kia Sportage and I just got my offer in the mail today to go to Kia and get a free software upgrade right as I notice my insurance shooting up $40. Of note I'm in Louisiana where they are facing state farms new policy.

[1]https://www.wdsu.com/article/louisiana-state-farm-car-insura...

The proliferation of knowledge about how easy it was to do this, and the resulting subcultural trend, is the reason they are being forced to change it. Otherwise, people would be stealing them at the same rates they were before the recent trend.

> "The thefts are reportedly easy to pull off because many 2015-2019 Hyundai and Kia vehicles lack electronic immobilizers that prevent thieves from simply breaking in and bypassing the ignition. The feature is standard equipment on nearly all vehicles from the same period made by other manufacturers."

It's more than that.

It's a combination of a lack of electronic immobilizer and putting the mechanical component behind a piece of plastic.

If they really want to save pennies on the immobilizer, they can move the mechanical piece further down the steering column

if this is what it took to get two large multinational automakers to capitulate to basic theft immobilization in their vehicles to protect customers, perhaps we should reconsider the 'tiktok is objective evil' narrative.

Totally agree. Sounds like they're just using an established, more generic narrative to deflect accountability - basically, "It's not our fault, it's the hackers and bad kids on the internet." We see this all the time for security incidents: "Hackers steal data from BigCorp", when the headline should read more like, "BigCorp released a faulty product, and now you're suffering."

> perhaps we should reconsider the 'tiktok is objective evil' narrative.

I don't think the fact that tiktok was educating car thieves on ideal targets leading to an increase in stolen vehicles is a great example of tiktok's benevolence or enough to excuse it for the other harms it enables.

That said, nothing is pure evil all the time. Tiktok is just a popular means of communication and sometimes the message being communicated will be good and sometimes it will be bad. There's no criticism of tiktok's content that doesn't apply just as much to youtube or any other social media platform. However, tiktok still has their own privacy/security issues, the concerns over what and who gets promoted or suppressed by tiktok's algorithms/moderators, and of course that whole supporting china/genocide/the oppression of hong kong thing all of which makes me doubt the "tiktok is evil" narrative is going to go away just because a couple car companies caved to some bad press.

> The feature is standard equipment on nearly all vehicles from the same period made by other manufacturers.

Even worse, that feature has been pretty common on mainstream vehicles since the 90s.

Which makes it an excellent opportunity to undercut competitors by a hundred bucks.

I wonder how systemic these kinds of shortcuts are in the wider market, not just automotive. How many problems that were solved in expensive ways decades ago are lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be discovered again because the problem - and solution! - are effectively invisible to most consumers?

Pretty much everything. The practice of engineering is as much an exercise in knowing what problems to solve as it is a practice in knowing which problems you can get away with not solving.

It's interesting to me that there's a similar problem in New Zealand with NZ-new and second-hand imports of the same model cars: the Toyota Prius C and Toyota Aqua are the same vehicle, but Aquas that were imported second-hand from Japan don't typically have immobilisers, and are heavily targeted for theft.

Given that ex-Japan models of cars are typically higher-spec than NZ-new equivalents, it's seems an odd difference; I have to wonder if there are differences in car theft rates in Japan or South Korea that play into the difference in what is a pretty basic piece of equipment in Western markets.

South Korea has 5.3 car thefts per 100k people per year. Japan has 28.1.

The US has 268.2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_theft#Motor_vehi...

Additionally, this only happens for cars built for the U.S. The other countries have electronic immobilizer requirements, so they have them.

Ah that makes sense. I briefly combed the article and was confused because I had a factory immobiliser in my base model 97 Lantra.

was curious, all new cars in canada required them after 2007! https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/anti-theft-device-now-mandato...

but now we're seeing a rash of thefts of keyless fob vehicles with a relay attack making me glad my tacoma needs a key

I thought keyless fobs all had some sort of counter to prevent replay attacks

Relay, not replay attack. For vehicles that unlock and push to start based on the proximity of the key, basically all you need to do is use a pair of software defined radios to trick the car into thinking that the key is there. Hence a relay attack, where one attacker is located near the key and the other is located near the vehicle, and the two attackers pass the components of the challenge/response to the vehicle via the channel between the two attackers.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the detailed explanation

Don't they use time of flight?

Newer fobs, sure. But as this article demonstrates, it is very expensive and inconvenient to backport security improvements to millions of vehicles.

but that of course would cost more money to implement correctly with no further flaws, and many companies are opting for other solutions: https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/keyless-car-theft-prevention

many many cars are vulnerable to it and will be for a long time.

This is funny because we have a Hyundai Elantra 2010 and that one has an immobilizer. You can't turn it on without the encoded key.

I guess that at some point Hyundai and Kia decided to save some money?

>I guess that at some point Hyundai and Kia decided to save some money?

If this can be fixed with a software update, that's not saving money. That's making money by making you pay extra for the immobilizer.

Back in the '80s and '90s, many computer vendors like Sun and IBM shipped their systems with radically broken security configs, not to mention holes in their software. Often, the only way to get them to fix their problems was to make their problems very public. Hence, BUGTRAQ.

https://bugtraq.securityfocus.com/archive

I just bought a 23 Kia Telluride (was also looking at palisades) to upgrade my 05 outback; I did extensive research, and ended up zoning in on Hyundai-Kia specifically because their electronics are so 'hackable,' while still containing all the cutting edge sensors.

I think it is going to be a tiny sliver of cars that are allowed to get away with having a vehicle be able to be controlled like a remote control from a completely unencrypted, trivially intercepted-and-changed protocol. In the future I suspect if manufacturers want to put these features on cars, they will have to protect the communication between the different systems.

How do you like it? And why did you pick the Telluride over the Palisade?

It's of course a huge improvement. It was close and I'd probably have been happy with either but ultimately the telluride had features i cared about (better towing) and palisade had some i didn't (electified third row seats); and I like the look of the telluride better.

I live in a rural area and got the trim with the 'offroadish' appeal; which didn't really exist in palisade.

From what I've gathered, "Viral TikTok Challenge" and its variations are sleeper-agent activation phrases for news editors which make them automatically accept the next story pitch you give them.

Headlines are chosen by the editor, not the journalist, to my knowledge.

I'm pretty sure that steering wheel locks were required by law starting in the 1970s. Does this process bypass the steering wheel lock somehow? Or do these cars not have steering wheel locks?

The plastic under the steering wheel is removed exposing the ignition barrel, at the end of the barrel you can pop it off. Exposing a little fob like turner, stick your usb cable over it and twist. The steering lock gets released. This is an old car stealing trick however, in the olden days you could do the same thing but the steering column would remain locked. Skinny 12 year olds in the UK had enough strength to snap the lock by grabbing the wheel and quickly pulling it in either direction, once you broke the lock you were good to go! We called them twocs (taken without owners consent) the whole adventure was known as joy riding..

The Kia boys were a couple of American youths doing something similar and uploading videos of it on tik tok. A reporter asked them, don’t you feel bad for people who’s cars you are stealing? The kid replied nah, they got insurance. The reporter- what if they don’t have insurance? The kid straight faced and serious- that’s illegal so they shouldn’t be doing that. Sure the video of that interview is out there somewhere. Hilarious. Also unlucky if your car got stolen. Don’t blame the kids they just bored and need guidance.

Someone is clearly taking advantage of this:

More than 3,000 cars have been reported stolen in Minneapolis this year, including 432 Kias and 368 Hyundais. Officers are warning people to do what they can to protect their vehicles because this year, an average of 13 cars are stolen each day.

Prior to this spring, Hondas, Toyotas, Chevys, and Fords were the most common cars stolen in Minneapolis. But as word spread on social media this year about how easy Kias and Hyundais are to steal, they now account for more car thefts.

https://www.fox9.com/news/data-kias-and-hyundais-now-most-st...

>This is like saying that movies in the 1980s sparked a rash of car thefts because they showed people hotwiring cars all the time.

Probably did, but the scale of the problem is much larger considering TikTok's reach.

From what I know all of this originated in Milwaukee with the original "Kia Boyz"[0]. It's been going on there for years - to the point where I've seen wedding invitations that explicitly state not to bring a Kia/Hyundai to Milwaukee. Additionally, car rental companies will not rent Kia/Hyundai anywhere near Milwaukee.

As is the case with most car thefts they are an absolute menace to the streets. "Drive it like it's stolen" is a very real thing[1][2].

Warning - discussion on this topic gets especially racist very quickly so as usual ignore the comments. Seriously, don't even look.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbTrLyqL_nw

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdilXqQaQZU

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VJhLJsBs74

Car theft for joy riding is a really common reason for kids(!) and adolescents to end up "in the system". I don't know how many car thefts that activity accounts for, but it's got to be a non-trivial amount.

It may be the final straw, but I'm not sure it's the proximate cause. A nice boy doesn't wake up one day and decide to steal a car for fun - there's a lot of indoctrination leading up to that before he even considers himself capable of such an act.

Well, sure, it's just a fairly-common act that gets them caught.

[EDIT] I do appreciate your distinction between that being the thing that gets them caught, and its being the "reason", however.

Bollux no indoctrination needed and what exactly is a nice boy? Kids in poor areas find things to do, simple. Stop local governments from closing the youth centers and the kids might have something to do that isn’t stealing cars.

A lady was killed by a stolen Kia doing 70 mph on a residential street a block away from me a few months ago. They did end up catching the kids that did it, somehow. I’m sure she’s not the only death resulting from this.

I hope the shareholders of the Kia/Hyundai Corporation are happy about their extra penny per share (if that) in dividends from the immobilizer savings. The reputational harm from this will be long lasting.

I hope the kids that killed that lady get punished for their actions.

I kept thinking of this scene from the movie Fight Club:

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

Totally ignoring all recalls car companies are legally required to do, aka those recalls in which the companies have no say in whatsoever. It makes for a good dialogue in a movie so.

That makes fun movie dialog, but I don't think the car company decides on their own whether or not to do a safety recall. The NHTSA can force them to do a recall for a serious issue if the manufacturer doesn't do it voluntarily. The NHTSA usually finds out about defects by owners filing directly with the NHTSA, so it doesn't take direct cooperation from the manufacturer to start an investigation.

In the early stages or sufficiently low levels of B they can. The NHTSA doesn't investigate every crash like the FAA does for plane crashes.

The NTSB has a much larger role than the FAA in plane crash investigations.

True I knew in the moment I wasn't quite right about the exact agency. The core point stands though imo, car crashes don't receive the same scrutiny airplane crashes do in most cases.

It still takes people being injured or dying over many years to find out about a flaw that was known to several levels of engineering & management during the design phase of a car.

The entire movie is a teenaged cringeworthy fever dream.

Either immediately before or after that scene he goes on to tell his neighbor that the only reason oxygen masks are on airplanes is to keep people calm when they are about to die.

>-Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It's all right here. Emergency water landing, 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.”

Airline companies don't care if people are "calm" if they are going to die. They are not worried about the upset ghosts of dead passengers coming to haunt them. And oxygen doesn't turn you into a docile cow. I'm a volunteer EMT and if oxygen turned people docile that would make my job a hell of a lot easier.

The oxygen is there to keep you alive at altitude if there is a decompression event. At sea level it does nothing. edit: the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level is ~160mmHg and airplane passenger masks supply ~122mmHg-- they only exist to keep you alive until the pilot can descend.

One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club.

You appear to have understood the movie.

> One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club.

Yep, lots of people... don't understand the movie.

You'd think when it came to creating a strict cult and cutting people's balls off and shit, people'd start to go "wait a minute... wasn't this about escaping the media- and corporation-driven rat-race for freedom, and, uh, masculinity or something? WTF?" and start to get a clue that they maybe shouldn't trust everything this Tyler guy says because a lot of it might just be nice-sounding bullshit, let alone where it goes from there—but, shockingly, no.

On the one hand, if so many people get it wrong, maybe that's the movie's fault; but on the other, it's not like the movie's subtle.

Agreed. To add to it, the movie has some even more obvious things that make the actual message clear.

The narrator keeps talking about how "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy", and Tyler keeps advocating for "breaking out of the system" to become individuals. Only for everyone to join project mayhem, shave their heads, dress in exact same clothing, get rid of their own names, and to obey every command of Tyler without questioning. None of it was subtle at all, it was as thick as it could possibly get. And there are plenty of examples in the movie that reaffirm those points too.

I don't think of any way they could've made the entire message of the movie any more obvious, other than explicitly spelling it out.

> The entire movie is a teenaged cringeworthy fever dream.

I think you might have missed the entire point of the movie. It legitimately criticizes and satirizes Tyler, the narrator, and everyone involved in project mayhem as immature edgelords with their entire premise being self-contradicting.

I am still baffled by how many adults watch that movie and get the entire opposite message of what the movie was trying to tell. It's like watching Breaking Bad and coming to a conclusion that the point of the show was to show Walter White as a great human being.

I wouldn't quite paint everyone in Project Mayhem as immature edgelords (not even the narrator)—I think there's some genuine hole in their lives and need for belonging that's missing, and that society/capitalism/the-standard-life-plan/media-defined-masculinity/whatever isn't providing.

Thing is, Tyler's message and the way he actually "helps" these people are very much at-odds, and a lot of his message is, in fact, immature edgelord shit, sprinkled with trite and well-worn but not exactly wrong nuggets of kinda-wisdom.

I actually think Tyler's being a bit appealing, at first, is an important part of the movie. If the audience isn't convinced someone could fall for his schtick, the story doesn't work very well.

In fact, I think the film's maybe more relevant than ever. There are whole movements and personalities that look an awful lot like Tyler's mix of true-and-false and smart-and-stupid "wisdom", and in a lot of cases they are (nominally) addressing actual problems or something that's missing for a lot of people.

> I actually think Tyler's being a bit appealing, at first, is an important part of the movie.

Absolutely agreed. On a surface level, especially in the beginning, Tyler is this good looking guy who does what he wants in the face of the world, and is pretty appealing and charismatic. To make people understand the point, you need to make them relate to the situation in a good way. Having a cool and a charismatic guy who is pissed at the world in similar ways to you is a really great hook.

The concerns of people who fell for project mayhem were indeed valid in the real world at the time (and imo still are), such as heavily increasing consumerism, apathy due to a lack of direction, etc., which made it very relatable. I don't know how common it is among people empirically, but I definitely had a brief moment in life when I felt the whole "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy". And I would not be surprised to find out that this is actually very common.

Those things are something that resonates with a ton of people in real life, but majority of people have much healthier ways of acting on those feelings, compared to how people in the fight club acted on them. However, many definitely fantasized about acting out in "edgy" ways in response, and the movie just used those fantasies to illustrate where the satirized logical conclusion leads.

The movie quote is loosely based on a memo that Ford sent to the NHTSA to lobby against new safety standards. The so-called Pinto Memo has a lot of mythology around it. It wasn't specific to the Ford Pinto, but it was used in some of the Pinto lawsuits to say "this is the kind of cost-benefit analysis that Ford does when designing their fuel systems". The Pinto Memo also didn't compare the cost of safety improvements against potential lawsuits-it compared them against the NHTSA's own figure for the financial value of saving a life.

For the Takata airbag recalls most if not all major auto makers announced recalls before being forced to by the various transportation authorities. In the US for example recalls were announced by automakers in June, NHTSA didn't make it mandatory until November (according to wikipedia anyway).

Though given this is a security thing, not a safety one is there an agency that could force the recall?

State Farm reportedly excludes 14 Hyundai and Kia models from new policies

https://www.autoblog.com/2023/02/09/hyundai-kia-models-state...

Seattle City Attorney Files Lawsuit Against Kia and Hyundai to Abate Public Safety Hazard Created by Exponential Rise in Theft of Their Vehicles

https://news.seattle.gov/2023/01/25/seattle-city-attorney-fi...

My 2016 sorento lx v6 has an immobilizer and uses a regular key (not a pushbutton)... I know it works cause I've tripped it.

"Hyundai and Kia forced to update software on millions of vehicles because of viral TikTok challenge" is the original title. i did my best to preserve it.

one thing that irritates me about this is the keyword "forced". This issue started in 2020, with numbers going up to nearly 20 cars stolen per day. Seems like a very slow and labored response to such a terrible problem with their cars.

There were 2220 cars stolen per day in 2020. While token bypass is a problem, I suspect that the biggest vulnerability is that nearly all cars lack MFA. Steal the token and you can steal the car.

I can't imagine the hell that borrowing a friend's car will be in a world that requires MFA to start the engine.

I can't imagine a world where thieves get away with their crimes so easily neither.

A password or PIN might work if sharing cars.

here in vancovuer canada the police started a baitcar (and bait bike/boat) program that proved very effective at discouraging car thefts. This what police should be doing instead of going after people selling drugs or giving out speeding tickets.

According to wikipedia, BC's program was modeled after a program started by Minneapolis police in 1998.

Bait car programs are pretty well known in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_Car_(TV_series)

And police in the recent problem areas have been doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAZh6D9sftw

Bait cars are racist now.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/08/police-bait-truc...

The racist part in this article is not a bait car. The story isn’t even about a bait car, the bait was merchandise. It’s that a black neighborhood was targeted and the vehicle was filled with stereotypical merchandise.

Milwaukee vlogger's experience hanging out with car-stealing "Kia Boys:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbTrLyqL_nw

Over 10,000 cars were stolen in Milwaukee in 2021. That's one stolen auto for every 60 Milwaukee residents, young and old.

South Korea's full of vulnerable Kia and Hyundai vehicles, yet doesn't have this problem of teenage serial car thieves. American social dysfunction is a big part of the equation that results in the numbers above.

Is that true? I know the European-market cars all have an immobilizer due to regulation. I can't find evidence whether the South Korean market cars do or do not.

Perhaps there is no market for stolen cars in South Korea. Perhaps South Korea has an immobilizer law like many other industrialized nations. Perhaps more cars are parked in secure areas in South Korea, and cars in Milwaukee are parked on streets or driveways. Perhaps there is more CCTV and other surveillance in South Korea that makes it impossible to escape with a stolen car.

Not saying it's not a social issue, but there's a lot of other factors as well.

>Perhaps South Korea has an immobilizer law like many other industrialized nations.

Do they? I spent a few minutes searching but couldn't find an answer.

Here in my city, at least, virtually none of the stolen Kias/Hyundais were being sold. They were being stolen by middle schoolers for joy rides. Throughout the summer of 2022, groups of kids as young as 13 were stealing a different car each day, abandoning the ride of the day when it was out of gas (or damaged to the point of being inoperable).

It was pure crime of opportunity.

Thanks for sharing this video. It's hard to reconcile how these kids live and speak about their lives vs my own thinking. It seems to be a very nihilistic philosophy.

It is a very nihilistic philosophy. Unfortunately that philosophy is spreading, but it's also had an undercurrent there all along. There are a lot of people in the US that culturally do not have the same morals or system of ethics as the rest of the society, and they act out in ways which would appall the average person. This has been able to be mostly kept under wraps in the US because these subcultures, while shared across cities, on each local level are restricted to a small geographical area. With the rise of social media and the Internet, it has made the world a smaller place, allowing rapid communication between people with shared ideals and interests, and this is true for both positive interests and negative interests for society.

Car theft isn't even the half of it. Wait until you find out about the growth of card skimming in the inner city driven by social media. There are /many/ /many/ anti-social behaviors that are culturally rewarded within certain subcultures in the US. To even get to the point you have such a nihilistic world view, you have to have grown up in an environment without any serious positive role models, minimal to no hope for the future, and no realistic pathway in life to leave behind the circumstances you find yourself in. There are generations of people who have been bathed in this nihilism, and it's created a negative outcome for society on generational scale that's spreading.

Sad but true. This philosophy isn't exclusive to one race or demographic, either. Poor white kids fall into criminal subcultures just like anyone else when there seems to be no hope and no way out. Juggalo gangs are one example of this. It's no coincidence that they have a big following in economic wastelands like Detroit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggalo#Juggalo_gangs

South Korea is a much smaller country with a national healthcare system, strict weapons laws and CCTV everywhere

> Over 10,000 cars were stolen in Milwaukee in 2021

A third of them weren't Kias OR Hyundais

> American social dysfunction

All your stats are about Milwaukee, not America at large

"The thefts are reportedly easy to pull off because many 2015-2019 Hyundai and Kia vehicles lack electronic immobilizers" <-- Being the unfortunate owner of an even older suzuki ignis (secondary car, don't judge), who have has a key break and lost just the damn immobilizer chip from inside the key.. (meaning I had to spend over $100 for a replacement for a security system for a car nobody would steal anyway) I'm making a mental note that a 2015 Kia is a reasonable next car.

I'd pay a premium for a car with no digital electronics in the critical path (meaning I can repeair everything with a bag of diodes, resistors and capacitors)

> …for a car nobody would steal anyway) I'm making a mental note that a 2015 Kia is a reasonable next car.

But people are stealing the Kia’s. In bulk. That’s the issue discussed in the article. This contradicts your own reasoning about what people would want to steal.

I’d rather spend $100 on the extremely rare occasion I lose or break a key than own a car that’s trivial to steal. Each to their own though.

To be honest, I don't even lock my car anyway..

If people are stealing cars in bulk in a society, what that society has is not a problem with insufficient locks.

But I get your point.. If I was in a place like that and couldn't get out, I'd have no choice but to learn to love the security system, even if it is an additional risk of making trouble for me.

Surprised they didn't mention the City of Seattle lawsuit: https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-sues-kia-and-hyundai-af...

That's probably a bigger issue.

Always depressing how _any_ metric that is not regularly benchmarked will be ignored by manufacturers and noticeable degrade in a short timeframe. No matter what consumer's reasonable expectations of that metric are.

They weren’t stolen because of TikTok, they were stolen because there’s no mechanical lock on the steering wheel and no requirement for the key to be present when running the car.

The “usb cable” for the attack is not anything technical, it’s purely because a usb plug is approximately the same size as the socket used to house the ignition switch/key. You could also just use a screwdriver, knife, etc

Last summer, my piece of shit 2014 Kia Soul was stolen by our local "Kia Boyz" franchise. The thieves totaled it. I got a check for more than it was worth at the time.

We were contemplating going down to one car anyway, because of permanent work from home policies.

I couldn't have been happier.

Oh, and fuck you Kia, your car was a piece of shit.

Kia is a lot like the American cars of the 90s. Once you creep near 100K, major problems (or repairs that effectively total the vehicle) pop up like weeds. Their GDI, gasoline direct injection, engines are garbage: the valves and injectors get coated in carbon from the lack of a 'fuel wash', and they burn oil like crazy.

The official word from Kia/Hyundai is that burning a quart of oil every 1000 miles is perfectly normal, and that you should be checking your oil level at every fill up to avoid the likely scenario where you seize the engine. Before K/H will consider that you have an issue (even with dozens of class actions filed), you need to have the dealership perform a measured oil burn test and a piston soak, all out of pocket to the owner.

My wife's Kia Soul has burned so much oil that it now throws codes indicating a catalytic converter failure at <100K miles. I won't be sinking that kind of money into that trash heap. Maybe I can interest the Kia Boys in a ride? Just make sure you total it and don't hurt anybody.

The best part is this 'fix' is just adding an ignition kill-switch routine that requires you unlock with the keyfob to be able to start the car, then re-lock afterwards to disable the ignition.

Wonder what happens when your keyfob fails at that point - you can get in with the mechanical key, but now can't enable the ignition because you can't unlock it with the fob to signal the software.

(And if they make it so you can unlock and drive with an actual mechanical key in the door disabling the system, then it only takes 30-60 more seconds for someone with a Lishi pick to pop the door open and trigger the unlock themselves.)

Yup, cars up here in Seattle are getting stolen left and right with that damn usb cord trick.

I thought immobilisers were not only standard nowadays, but a legal requirement in some places. I don't understand why they would regress on something so simple.

It looks like Hyundais are starting to get updates, anyway. I'm having trouble finding information on Kia updates.

> update the “theft alarm software logic” to extend the length of the alarm sound from 30 seconds to one minute

Almost literally Steven Wright's joke: "I couldn't fix your brakes so I made your horn louder."

Normally I hate TikTok but this time the challenge did good: auto makers should take software and security much more seriously.

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