In 2007, Canada started requiring all vehicles to have a cheap, effective anti-theft device. The U.S. didn’t. Now, it is paying the price with a surge in Kia and Hyundai thefts.
“In 2005, Transport Canada, a federal agency, decided to do something about it. Starting in 2007, it declared, all passenger vehicles sold in Canada would require an engine immobilizer, a basic anti-theft device that uses an electronic signature in the key to unlock the engine. If the key isn’t present, the car can’t be started. This prevents hot wiring and other old-school, brute force methods of stealing cars.”
Saved you a few min.
Article says it simply never occurred to the US that it should require immobilizers.
In what people call the greatest nation in the world, thousands of regulators simply never thought of the idea of an immobilizer which is something that was already available on a lot of cars. Sure.
More likely is that auto manufacturers bitched that it would make cars too expensive and it should be voluntary while donating to some legislators campaign.
They probably wanted to make it an add-on charge that they could add 1000% markup on
To be fair, immobilizers were standard at the time. Every manufacturer was already using them because using an immobilizer is just common sense. So making a law requiring them to use immobilizers would be like making a law requiring people to wipe their asses. It would have just been seen as useless because everyone is already doing it and who in their right mind would suddenly just stop wiping their ass. It’s only fairly recently that kia and huandai have suddenly lost their minds and decided to walk around with shit covered asses. Also from what I’ve seen every judge that has looked at the issue is already ruling against them because not including an imobilizer is so willfully stupid that it’s gross negligence.
That would require US politicians to ignore various lobbies (and their $$$) and focus on consumer protections. Don’t see that happening.
I mean, maybe it’s because engine immobilizers have been standard equipment since 1998, and Hyundai/Kia are the only marques that chose to buck the trend? My family’s Mercury had an immobilizer… in 1995.
Because it allows car makers to save $5 on each car and pass the savings along to their bank accounts.
This is what blows my mind. Like, cars cost tens of thousands of dollars. No one is going to balk at an extra $5 bucks for this feature. If nothing, it’s worth the cost to the manufacturer in PR terms. Now Hyundai/Kia have a bad reputation for car thefts. I’m sure avoiding that would have been worth the $5.
