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Comment by badpun | Hacker News Reader

Why don't the producers just add a physical button you have to press in order to open the car? It sounds like much less hassle than remembering to store your keys in a proper container always. It looks like it's just marketed to lazy and uninformed people.

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Because people value walking up to the car and just opening it vs finding the fob in their pocket and pressing a button, and that convenience outweighs the small risk their car gets stolen which is replaced anyway via insurance.

Part of why insurance is so expensive is the mindset that insurance will just cover everything, leading to a lack of vigilance by some.

In point of fact, Insurance companies have been refusing to cover some of these Kia and Hyundai cars because they're "too easy to steal". The lack of immobilizer chip apparently is the culprit.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/27/business/progressive-state-fa...

Yep, in my country (Poland), a couple years ago, the yearly insurance premium for some new models of Mazdas were reaching 25% value of the car. They were that easy to steal.

I cannot believe that modern (consumer) cars are being sold without an immobiliser.

Down here in Australia it's been a legal requirement since 2001 that vehicles be sold fitted with immobilisers, and our versions of the Kia and Hyundai models mentioned in the article you link to are not vulnerable to this attack.

The engineering work is already done, it is pure greed on the part of the manufacturer to leave it out.

Why not just require motion from the key in the past 30 seconds for it to be active? If I'm walking to my car, the key is bouncing around in my pocket, so make it active. When it's sitting in a drawer in my house, it's not moving, so make it inactive.

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