Commercial tow trucks are not hard to get in many places, but it is also not required to tow a car. There are many consumer oriented solutions for towing a car. Tow dollies are about $40 to rent in my city. Or if you're a thief, trailers aren't hard to steal either.
> If you can’t easily get a new key, the resell value for that car is going down dramatically.
Most of the vehicles that are stolen for resale are high value and sent overseas to parts of the world where the labor cheap to do something like entirely rip out all of the security components. I don't really think that these criminals will stuff a G-wagon in a shipping container for $100,000 but they won't do it for $80k or $90k.
> Commercial tow trucks are not hard to get in many places, but it is also not required to tow a car. There are many consumer oriented solutions for towing a car. Tow dollies are about $40 to rent in my city. Or if you're a thief, trailers aren't hard to steal either.
Again, it’s possible but do you really think there isn’t even one thief who lacks easy access to a tow truck or will be caught firing up noisy equipment at 3am but not if they fumble around in their pocket while walking up to a car? Not a single teenager looking to joyride won’t give up if it’s harder than the Kia video they saw on Tik Tok?
Similarly, yes, people will still steal vehicles and ship them overseas but the more work they do the lower the resale market and value will be, and that will make it less tempting since you’d only be able to sell to people who are content never getting service from the manufacturer. Even if we assume that there are countries with skilled technicians and effectively no law enforcement, only something like 10-15% of stolen vehicles are shipped according to U.S. officials so even if you wrote those off entirely you would have plenty of room to improve by reducing the majority of thefts which never leave the country.
There's different categories of criminal here who are willing and able to do different things to different types of cars.
> Again, it’s possible but do you really think there isn’t even one thief who lacks easy access to a tow truck or will be caught firing up noisy equipment at 3am but not if they fumble around in their pocket while walking up to a car?
Canbus attacks, OBDII reprogrammers, and similar are typically pretty intrusive, they require cutting into fender liners, removing lamps, busting a window, or otherwise gaining physical access to the bus. They also require specialized tooling and expertise that are harder to get than the tools which physically move vehicles.
The one that might be an exception, and some savvy street criminal might be able to get their hands on is a tool to do is a relay attack, which is usually good enough to steal belongings from a car, but generally not capable of stealing the car.
> Not a single teenager looking to joyride won’t give up if it’s harder than the Kia video they saw on Tik Tok?
Definitely not. Vehicles with immobilizers are essentially never stolen by joyriders unless they have also stolen the keys.
> Even if we assume that there are countries with skilled technicians and effectively no law enforcement, only something like 10-15% of stolen vehicles are shipped according to U.S. officials
Yes, and almost all of the other ones either just lack immobilizers, or the thief also stole the keys.
> If you can’t easily get a new key, the resell value for that car is going down dramatically.
Most of the vehicles that are stolen for resale are high value and sent overseas to parts of the world where the labor cheap to do something like entirely rip out all of the security components. I don't really think that these criminals will stuff a G-wagon in a shipping container for $100,000 but they won't do it for $80k or $90k.