March, 1998

It went off at two-thirty in the morning, a car alarm somewhere on my block and I woke, rolled over and tried to get back into the dream I was having, but no luck. They're supposed to have a timed shut-off, but perhaps this was an old model, perhaps I didn't care, perhaps wanted to go out and demolish the offending car with a baseball bat, perhaps, perhaps and I finally got up to make coffee. I'm weary of the noise that doesn't come on little cat feet, but bursts at me from car alarms, amplified music outside stores and the scream of ambulance drivers on their way to Dunkin' Donuts.

The coffee led me to my 'follow the money' theory of things that make my life less agreeable and there's money in stolen cars. Not only the money the car thief or chop-shop makes, but the really big dough made by allowing them their trade.

I sketched in my mind the winners in this absurdity; the sellers of those colorful steel rods stretched across steering-wheels, of car alarms, auto insurance, auto-glass shops, car-radio retailers, banks and loan companies, perhaps even the drug dealer a couple neughborhoods away. But primarily the auto dealers and manufacturers, those guys for sure. It's a chump-change deal for the retailers, mere tens of millions. A little more, probably hundreds of millions for the insurance companies, allowed as they are to fix rates to loss ratios. But it's billions for the automakers and maybe that's why they don't have an interest in theft-proofing their product.

A stolen car sets in motion a renewable resource of profit as loans are paid off by insurance and new cars are purchased at ever increasing prices. Their owners load them with safeguards, looking worriedly over their shoulders on the way into the grocery store.

The losers are a much shorter list, just you and me. But we pay for it, all those billions have nowhere to come from but our pockets.

I have a friend with a car that customizes itself for any of four drivers, just by the touch code-buttons after the key is inserted. Ain't computers great? The seat and steering-wheel position, inside and outside mirrors, even the desired temperature return to memorized preferences for the short wife, tall husband and intermediate kids. How come a similar device can't lock the transmission, freeze all the brakes and deactivate the entire electrical system until a magnetic card and pin-code are registered in a slot in the dashboard?

Your and my bank card and credit cards have used this system for years, but perhaps that's because there aren't so many winners in bank and credit card fraud. Is that too cynical, a little too wired on this should-be-sleeping-hours coffee?

If it seems I have painted the winners in this scenario as co-conspirators in some dark scheme, perhaps they are by virtue of benign neglect, that looking-the-other-way when fixing a fixable problem removes billions from the sales sheets. The quiet lobbying of the winners quite easily accepts that it's technologically beyond their ken to manufacture theft-proof cars. We poor old individual losers, the folks who put up the money, don't have much lobbying power and merely pound our pillows when the alarms go off.

But the day will come when Toyota or BMW or some other foreign manufacturer will solve the solvable problem. They will offer the unstealable car as a sales incentive and I'll be among the first in line to plunk down my money. Then you watch how quickly the industry catches up and maybe we'll all sleep better.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today