Hacker News Reader

Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

This is true in absolute terms but over simplified because it glosses over the differences in scale. We require cars to have seatbelts because even though people still die in crashes, it’s a statistically certainty that many fewer die when seatbelts are used.

Setting minimum standards is a critical function of governments in maintaining healthy markets because it prevents cheating from being cost effective. If you make a safety feature optional, you will have some fraction of people say that they don’t need it and then cost society money when it turns out they were wrong. In the case of poor locks, even if much of the cost is paid by the owners’ insurance there’s still a lot of expense from the extra police and court costs, and stolen cars are often used to support other crimes.

View on HN

Thank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised at how illogical so many of these comments are. People talking about towing cars or picking locks acting as if it's not obvious what the distinction is here.

Yeah people, nothing can have perfect security. That's a given anyway. I think the point is that if you can steal it with a $250 device SDR device, the car's level of security is the issue not the device and that should be acknowledged by their government before they ban something that will do nothing except put these things in the hands of only the bigger crime groups. These things likely wouldn't be hard to manufacture by hand if these criminals wanted to get a hold of them.

> Thank you. Reading through these comments I was surprised at how illogical so many of these comments are.

Many commenters on HN lean libertarian, thus some will go through great lengths and mental gymnastics to avoid the conclusion that government regulation is (part of) the answer.

> We require cars to have seatbelts

Seatbelts are not adversarial. A better seatbelt does not encourage other drivers to crash their cars into you even harder or anything like that, it's people versus nature.

Security systems are in a permanent arms race, people versus people. You could have a more expensive lock that requires a more expensive device to defeat, but this makes your car more expensive to make, so it has a higher price, so it becomes a more valuable target, and so on.

The problem is that I think these hands free remote start locks are more expensive than actual real physical locks which are immune to the types of attacks so that argument just actually doesnt work at all.

My bad, I was thinking in terms of the expensive remote start lock vs an even more expensive and safer remote start lock.

But if the fancy insecure lock is more expensive, the problem should fix itself eventually, right? Consumers will switch back to the cheaper system of their own accord.

It sucks for the people who bought the insecure cars without knowing, but banning insecure cars is not going to help them retroactively in any way.

Where I live the used car market is hot. It is hard to find a car made before 2012 because for the most part they are as reliable and fuel efficient as modern cars, are cheaper to repair, and cheaper to insure.

I dont think they are so desirable just because they are more secure but they dont have remote start options so they are at least in part more secure than modern remote start cars. The problem I am getting at is that there are no secure modern car options. None.

> there are no secure modern car options

I don't think there can be such a thing as a secure remote start option. The only way they can make it more secure than traditional keys is if they also make it less convenient to use than traditional keys, and then there is no point because the traditional keys will be easier and cheaper.

What happened is that consumers did not know that the remote keys were unsafe, and now they know.

What I don't understand is why insecure cars should be banned by law. Now that everyone knows about the issue, surely everyone will switch to a more secure system of their own accord.

>even if much of the cost is paid by the owners’ insurance

Insurers aren't usually charities. Those costs are still borne by the insured.

Yes. That’s why I listed it first as a separate category – it’s easy to see a stolen car as a loss of, say, $20-30k for the private insurance company and owner but there’s also going to be a cost for the time the police spend investigating, the city might spend disposing of a wrecked vehicle, the courts spend processing a car thief, etc. and potentially other significant costs if, say, a Kia challenge teenager hits another person or the vehicle is used to rob a house or business. While we can’t prevent it in absolute terms, there is still a significant social benefit to reducing car theft rates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com