This won't have nearly the same impact, but when you're considering how vulnerabilities like this might influence your future purchasing decisions, remember that Kia's decision to omit interlocks from their US vehicles (but not Canadian ones!) led to a nationwide epidemic of Kia thefts so large it fed a crime wave, something a number of US cities are suing Kia over. If you've read about carjacking waves in places like Milwaukee and Chicago: that was largely driven by a decision Kia made, which resulted in the nationwide deployment of a giant fleet of "burner" cars that could be stolen with nothing but a bent USB cable.
> it fed a crime wave, something a number of US cities are suing Kia over
A large part of the crime wave stems from the policies these cities implemented. Many times from the same leaders who are suing Kia now.
For instance, a friend got their car stolen in D.C. After they caught the guy, they let him go with no consequences, because they said he was under 25 and it was the first time they caught him. D.C. recently put a convicted murderer on the sentencing commission who believes that this kind of "it's not really their fault if they're under 25" thinking should be extended to murders as well.
Local politicians even told us there wasn't a crime wave, and that it was just a fake narrative. Then when that stopped working, they started pointing fingers at everyone else they could.
To be specific, I don't think the cities are suing over the car thefts. If I understand correctly, they're suing because the availability of easily hacked Kia cars enabled a wave of other crimes, because the criminals knew they had easy access to a getaway vehicle that couldn't be traced back to them.
> It's fair to say that a company which makes cars that can be stolen with only a USB socket bears significant culpability for car thefts.
WHAT?
I don’t have my wallet on a chain, do I have some responsibility if I get pickpocketed?
These criminals are breaking the law, it is ENTIRELY their fault. Any other interpretation has way, way too many logic holes and strange consequences that says it’s our fault when a criminal willingly breaks the law.
If suddenly a massive number of cars are stolen, that's the government's problem. (As now police forces have to deal with criminals trivially obtaining getaway cars)
So it seems reasonable that the manufacturer in question should be sued for the cost of the additional police resources required.
> If suddenly a massive number of cars are stolen, that's the government's problem.
I have no idea why you jump to that conclusion.
The problem is clearly the person breaking the law.
But anyway, going with what you said...
> So it seems reasonable that the manufacturer in question should be sued
Wait, if it's the government's problem, then THEY should be sued for not requiring manufacturers to have these anti-theft devices (as the Canadian government does). The auto manufacturer is building cars precisely as the US government mandated them to.
It seems like you're trying to bend logic to blame anyone and everyone other than the people who are breaking the law.
The linked page doesn’t define ‘social consequences of their choices’ nor do any of the linked or cited texts, and most don’t even touch on the issue of differences between ‘companies’ making a choice and individuals within the companies making a choice.
I’ll take victim blaming for $200, Alex. Breaking into a house is easy as a rock through the window but we don’t sue homebuilders for not putting in stronger glass.
So if a window manufacturer decides to save money and not put latches on their windows, enabling them to be opened from the outside at will, and home invasions spike, that manufacturer isn't a large part of the problem?
Part of the problem and the only cause are not the same thing.
Both Kia and the thieves can be in the wrong. Trying to break it down to one cause is never going to work.
Some car will always be the easiest to steal. People should always take reasonable precautions. But crime is still crime; if someone leaves their car running with the door unlocked as they run into the store and it gets stolen - they made a mistake but the criminal did a crime.
Your use of “only cause” was the first in this discussion.
Lots of people get sued for lots of things. Nowhere does it say that suits can succeed only if the defendant is the sole cause of the problem. See: Takata air bags. Huge liability, but in any given incident it wouldn’t be a problem unless someone else caused an accident. Yet Takata does not get to say “or defective product wouldn’t have been a problem if Mr. Doofus hadn’t rear-ended you”
Binary is great for computers, less good in legal thinking.
> Your use of “only cause” was the first in this discussion.
No, but this statement implied Kia wasn't at fault because someone else committed the crime...
> I’ll take victim blaming for $200, Alex. Breaking into a house is easy as a rock through the window but we don’t sue homebuilders for not putting in stronger glass.
So sure, that was the first use of "only cause"; in the same way that "there was 1 light" and "there weren't multiple lights" aren't the same words; but they contain the same information.
He was talking about civil liability. The concept you’ve tripped over here is called intervening superseding causes and the criminal only destroys the tortfeasor’s liability if his intervening criminal cause is unforeseeable.
Here, because the entire purpose of car immobilizers is theft protection, the thief is foreseeable and his crime does not supersede.
I’m a little troubled by your use of the word “asinine” in this context.
What about door locks? Or the ignition that had to be ripped out to use the usb stick trick? Does everyone have to use a club or hidden kill switch to not have them blamed.
I’d be willing to guess you won’t use this word salad when describing sexual crimes.
Literacy is important. I’m arguing that the criminal’s bad act does not necessarily break the chain of causation that makes Kia liable. You’re projecting that I’m blaming the consumer.
No they are not. At best they are a minor contributor. If people want security latches and whatnot they can buy them and pay accordingly. An easy to steal care beats no car every day of the week.
I live in a not great part of what's arguably the bluest state in the nation (which is to say this isn't some dumb red state "tough on crime" thing) and I can't imagine someone being able to go around checking windows or car doors for very long without a free ride in a cop car. Windows here are unlatched from May to September. I bet a lot of those houses have Kias in the driveway that they've had no theft problems with as we only have about a dozen car thefts per year here.
Ford Superduties over a huge year range can be stolen much the same way (you also have to punch out a lock before taking a screwdriver to the column) until very recently as PATS was not standard on the higher GVW stuff but those are expensive trucks so shitting on them doesn't scratch the same "validate my $50k purchase of something else" itch that crapping on Kia does.
And yet we have laws that disallow things that the buyer could just avoid by not purchasing. Because, as a society, we find it unacceptable for vendors to do certain things. And we hold them at fault if the do bad things, even if the buyer had the option to not buy it in the first place.
That being said, how many people buying Kias _knew_ the problem existed? You can't make an educated choice if the information isn't really available to be educated about.
There's a lot of this sort of thing in the UK at the moment which is really baffling to me.
One extreme is the death sentence, sure.
But on the other end it feels as if there are constant stories of career criminals who just do thing after thing after thing. It's not like someone just accidentally gets caught up in multiple assaults/robberies/break-ins etc. At some point you have to just think, okay, there's no rehabilitating this guy, how do we minimise the damage to society.
Locking 1,000 people up for a decade costs ~1 billion dollars. So even slightly more aggressive policies get expensive fast, and a surprising number of people “age out” of these kinds of crimes. It’s not clear if it’s hormones or what but you’ll see people with extensive rap sheets who end up as productive members of society in their 30’s or 40’s and beyond.
I'm aware that it's expensive but the alternative is pretty horrific.
A person that goes about assaulting people is a significant drain on society. It's not even just monetary, it ruins trust, it ruins the relations between the people who aren't antisocial. It also has the moral hazard effect of increasing the number of others that see that this behaviour ultimately goes unpunished.
As far as I'm concerned, there are very few legitimate reasons to raise taxes, but police and prisons are one of them, they are not problems that individuals can solve in the private sector.
>> treat your presence on the road like an inconvenience
Aren’t we all a bit guilty of that? Maybe not all the time - when I see an ambulance whizz past or a fire truck, I’m appreciative of their efforts.
But everyone else? You’re just in the way ultimately. There isn’t much pleasure to be derived in waiting around for someone to have their fair turn at the intersection or whatever.
Obviously as a rational human I’m quite capable of suppressing such thoughts and generally abide by the traffic laws, but the point still stands.
I don't mind at all, waiting for my turn on the road. What I do mind is not receiving it in kind - in London a lot of people refuse to let you in, they see getting from A to B as some sort of competition. Meanwhile, I'll let a car in in front of me if I have the opportunity, only to be denied it when I need to slip in from a minor road during rush hour. Humans are a selfish species, thank evolution and resource contention.
> Locking 1,000 people up for a decade costs ~1 billion dollars.
This is a purely political decision, not an inherent cost of jailing.
Your number comes down to $100k per person per year. That’s just insane. Many families earn less than that (post-tax)!
And obviously jail is supposed to be cheaper than non-jail life in the first place, because you’re not paying for luxury, just food, (cheap) rent and security.
That cost includes paying all of the staff (guards, admin, medical, social workers, etc) and maintaining the building(s) and infrastructure, I’m surprised it’s only $100k a year.
But why? I mean, just put each prisoner in a separate cell, why would you need more than 1 employee per 20-50 prisoners? Ok, maybe 3, for 24 hour rotation... Make sure you never unlock more than a single cell, and keep guns, lots of guns.
You need lots of doctors, especially with an aging prison population. Doctors aren't cheap. Not to mention the cost of medicine, which can get very expensive when you consider things like end stage cancer drugs for elderly prisoners who can't be released because they're serving LWOP, and it all must be paid for by the state.
Or consider institution GED classes. You might say, those can easily go on the chopping block to save some money. But then you end up with inmates who are released without a high school diploma and, lacking educational opportunities, are more likely to return to crime. Then they go back into the prison system where they use more state resources than if they had just been given education in the first place. It's easy to imagine scenarios in which programs like that are worthwhile in the long term purely for fiscal reasons even if you care 0% about the welfare of criminals themselves.
Prisoners should have access to healthcare and education at a similar level as provided for the general population. Other than security-related cost increases, the government is already bearing those costs.
Prisons can’t cheaply leverage the normal healthcare system. Sending someone to a dentist / hospital etc requires they remain unable to escape through the entire process which inherently adds overhead. Having healthcare workers on staff creates mismatches between their workload and the size of the prison population.
Prisons operate 24/7 365, so unless you’re thinking of having zero guards for most of the day your estimate is wildly off. Further, there’s real concern that people will escape their cells so there’s a real desire for manpower not just people to watch monitors.
Add admin staff etc, and the numbers escalate quickly.
They just have no space left in the jails, what can you do... I guess they hope that as long as protesters get a spot the damage to society will be manageable.
Canada, a bit more liberal than the US, probably has plenty of cities with such policies in place too. Yet, no crime wave there. These waves were a result of Kia's choices, and quite obviously so.
We're not talking about car theft in general, but about the specific crime waves that occurred after the rollout of the less than secure Kias in the US and the Kias with the proper security measures in Canada.
There's no Kia-specific crime wave in Canada as far as I know (I live there). But there's absolutely a general crime wave of car thefts in Canada, and it's quite plausibly tied to recent policy choices. Of course the effect of policy is going to be additive to the effect of blunders like Kia's. But there's good reason to think it has enough impact on its own to be worth discussing.
I'm kind curious, did Canada have the same spike in the "knockout game" that the US did?
If it did, that would point to a US and Canada crime trend correlation. If not, then you can't just say that the one static variable, city/county level policy and the independent variable, immobilizers, are the only factors.
You have different criminal populations, societal values, amounts of government aid, rehabilitation programs, etc that all play into the analysis.
Parent poster a-french-anon may be wrong or at least is making unsubstantiated wishful claims about costs and benefits - "the errors would be extremely rare" - would they really? And would they be evenly spread over in-groups and out-groups?
But at least the question "how is that acceptable?" is in fact a question of a moral nature. It's unacceptable, but it is unacceptable because it is immoral.
How is any error rate, no matter how small, acceptable when it comes to locking people up for the rest of their lives?
While I don't like the death penalty I don't think it's that different from a very long sentence. I don't think it makes sense to say that any punishment needs an absolutely perfect error rate.
Given how flagrantly governments have been using pedophiles as an excuse for curtailing our right to privacy, I don't trust them to execute civilians for this reason (or any). False convictions (intentionally so, in worse-governed countries) are a thing, and I do not cheer for the prospect of giving the government yet another reason to murder its citizens.
Advocacy in favor of the death penalty is never about "death penalty for murderers/rapists" but "death penalty for people convicted of being murderers/rapists". Practice has shown there's a big difference
Many people that escape prison kill people immediately after doing so. Either in the process of running from the law or simply taking over a house for a few days of cover.
It seems to me like taking care of business before that happens is a more beneficial thing.
Regarding the Kia Boyz - immobilizers have been mandatory in most of Europe since late 90s, in Canada since 2007.
Basically there is something to put on (lack of) regulations as well as on HKMC.
In the USA, we believe we don't need regulations, the Free Market(tm) will punish corporations that don't behave in a way that benefits their customers!
The problem isn't that we need better locks, but that we need locks at all.
Within my lifetime we've gone from leaving the backdoor unlocked at night and leaving the car keys on the seat (or in the ignition) from being the normal practice to being unthinkable.
We did when I was a kid. Nobody locked their doors in my town. In fact multiple people just had blanks over the holes meant for deadbolts.
Then the local powerplant shut down, and the manufacturing associated with it left as well. The largest employer in the area besides those two moved operations to China. Then methamphetamine became popular and then heroin, too.
> We did when I was a kid. Nobody locked their doors in my town. In fact multiple people just had blanks over the holes meant for deadbolts.
Yeah, because you guys had a warped perception of crime.
Virtually all crime now is significantly lower than it was just 20 years ago. You might not believe that, but it's true!
What's happening here is people's perceptions are being warped, almost certainly due to political propaganda. But the numbers don't lie, just take a look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
I hear you, and nationally that is probably true. But locally it's just not. There genuinely wasn't crime here outside of drunk fights once a year at the local pool hall.
Now there is genuine crime. Drugs and murder.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that your argument doesn't apply on the local scale. Using macro data for micro experience is a bad idea.
This is also the reason that argument falls flat in a lot of places.
For the majority of my childhood and teenage years the door was never locked. I don’t think it’s a British thing to leave your keys on the seat, but they were always in the hallway, right next to the unlocked door (like everyone else I knew).
I’m trying to think of the point this changed, and I can’t, but I would guess around 2008-2010 or so.
Maybe that's the goal. By creating the Kia Boyz situation, through omission of proven controls used in other countries, we created a nice conduit for more draconian measures.
Citation needed for the claim any significant fraction of the US population believe that regulations are completely unnecessary.
This runs directly contrary to my lived experience here, so unless you can provide evidence it sure seems like you're just stereotyping an entire nation to engage in ideological warfare.
Forty-nine states recklessly allow florists to sell flowers without a license. Only the good people of Louisiana are safe from dangers of unregulated flower purchases.
It doesn't need to be the population believing that regulations are completely unnecessary.
It just needs to be a sufficient number of politicians understanding that their donors and prospective donors find specific regulation of their industry overbearing.
And never an American one after the Pinto, and never a German one after the VW testing scam, and never a Japanese one after the recent safety scandal? I guess you can still get a Jaguar, so your mechanic won't complain.
I had been planning to keep driving my car for quite some time, but recently it's developed a weird engine noise and a check engine light that nobody can resolve. I'm not sure I'll be able to give EV charging a few more years to sort itself out.
Even if that’s true, they are clearly nowhere near as “cheap and plenty” as watching a Tik Tok video. The spike in crime was far greater than normal random variation.
Not really. At least not for those immobilizers that don't use "proprietary" ciphers.
Automotive loves security through obscurity until it bites them in the ass.
Today most manufacturers have moved to AES128, which is not cheap to brute force, especially if there is a rolling code (should be the case for many)
But you are right that there are many (older models) that use ciphers with know quick exploits:
TI's DTS40/DTS80 (40/80bit, proprietary cipher, in many cases terrible entropy), models from Toyota, HKMC, Tesla. About 6s to crack in many cases.
NXP's HTAG2 - most commonly used one in the '00s - 48bit proprietary cipher, a lot less exploited in the wild than the TI's disastrous two variants.
Those type of attacks (CAN injections) are very OEM specific, and come from deep insider knowledge, not something you fuck around and find out.
I’m assuming you’re referring to Toyota, but anyways please give direct reference to the attack you’re referring to.
Keep in mind any need for expensive equipment is already a deterrent for many.
Idk what the pattern is where you are, but the majority of stolen cars where I am are not sold or stripped or anything like that. They're used for N days and then ditched somewhere. Used either for joyriding, living in, crash&grab, or whatever.
One of my old neighbors had their same car stolen like 2-3 times, always ditched and found after some number of days missing.
That was the big shift here for the Kia mess. Normally the thieves tend to be professionals so the stolen ones are at a port or being stripped soon afterwards, but when that hit TikTok there were a lot more joyrides and brief use for theft/robbery because it was a bunch of teenagers who didn’t have much of a plan.
> If you've read about carjacking waves in places like Milwaukee and Chicago: that was largely driven by a decision Kia made, which resulted in the nationwide deployment of a giant fleet of "burner" cars that could be stolen with nothing but a bent USB cable.
"A nationwide epidemic of Kia thefts" seems to be a natural consequence of decreased security. However, that carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago specifically would follow from a nationwide omission of interlocks is not obvious as the vehicles are easily stolen without the need for personal confrontation. What is the connection of Kia interlocks to carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago?
> However, that carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago specifically would follow from a nationwide omission of interlocks is not obvious as the vehicles are easily stolen without the need for personal confrontation.
I think parent-poster means that the easily-stolen cars are being used as tools of carjacking, rather than the targets of it. In particular, carjacking that occurs by somehow provoking a victim to stop on the highway shoulder, a location where attackers can't exactly arrive by foot or bus or bike. That way they don't involve a vehicle that might be observed and traced back to them.
An alternate explanation is that they meant to write something like "theft" and accidentally put down "carjacking" instead.
This is correct, the usual procedure is: steal kia or hyundai with your friends using the no-interlock exploit --> find other cars to carjack (at gunpoint), or individuals to rob --> ditch stolen cars when no longer needed. Exploit no-pursuit policies as needed.
I've posted this point a couple times on HN and I guess I will keep posting until people stop expressing surprise that trivially stealable cars are a precursor to carjackings. I'm not dunking, there's no good reason for people to intuit that! But it's a really important thing to understand.
I'd really like to see a citation for carjackings going up more than any other crime that a stolen car enables.
Cars are hard to fence and if you have a stolen car there's other crimes you can commit that have similar upsides and lower sentences/risks. For example ATMs never run over your buddies or shoot back at you.
I worry that single percentage might be hiding some complexities like a subcategory of cars with a much lower recovery rate, or having the term "recovered" encompassing "as scrap".
Part of what makes it unintuitive is the specificity:
* Why Milwaukee and Chicago instead of everywhere?
* Why carjacking and not a general increase in crimes that could be facilitated by an unassociated car (bank robbery, toll violations, etc)?
The phenomenon started in Milwaukee (the "Kia Boys" challenge), and I happen to live in Chicagoland, which experienced a huge wave of carjackings immediately afterwards. I have one of them recorded on my Nest camera in the alley behind my house. Nothing in particular about those two cities otherwise.
As the sibling points out: it's a broader issue than just carjackings --- but the carjackings themselves were novel, scared the shit out of people in a way that stochastic-seeming strong arm robberies don't. The headline here is: it was a gravely negligent thing for Kia to have done; I hope they lose their shirts.
FWIW the associated crime wave was much broader than carjacking (and I’m actually not aware of a particular increase in carjackings specifically due to the Kia issues but I don’t know) but the Kia issues seem to have started in Milwaukee.
For whatever reason, it became A Thing here more than a year before it went national. Car thefts in Milwaukee more than doubled (entirely due to a stupidly large increase in Kia/Hyundai thefts) and we got a reputation for Kia thefts before it became a national issue
I question whether Milwaukee and Chicago are outstanding examples. I looked at a few reputable sources and those cities nor their states seem to be extremes in terms of car theft rates. Most of these law enforcement agencies are not specifically breaking our carjacking.
Random presentation of car theft stats comparing Chicago to a handful of others. We hear a lot about Chicago because many have a vested interest in deflecting discussions about crime. When was the last time you heard about the insane motor vehicle theft rate of Dallas? https://public.tableau.com/shared/W2KZH4JC7?:display_count=y...
Hell Mississippi as a state might soon pass Chicago in murder rate per capita. Chicago last year had a murder rate of 22.85 per 100,000 while Mississippi had a murder rate of 20.7 per 100,000. Louisiana had 19.8 and Alabama had 18.6..
"Places like" include Philadelphia. It's not a closed set, just some examples. I have friends that have had their KIA stolen this way, and others that have outright sold their car to get a different brand due to how prevalent it is here.
We Canucks needs all the features we can get to stop cars from being stolen, without exaggeration a car is stolen in Canada every 5 minutes on average.
I'm about to take delivery of a Toyota Sienna in Canada, and despite it being a minivan, it's a Toyota which are popular to steal right now. I plan to use both a steering wheel and accelerator pedal club. I've watched videos of both devices being rendered futile in less than 60 seconds but I hope that it will deter the less determined thieves. Then, after my kids have thoroughly destroyed the interior, I will hope that it gets stolen.
Have you considered not living in such an environment of fear? I have no idea of your circumstances, but this is something I see in my local relatives all the time. They buy ring cams and security systems, scrutinize nextdoor, etc. In reality, they are incomparably rich and safe compared to most. Personally I refuse to buy into this nonsense and just go about my life, despite living in a place that's far more dangerous by the numbers.
You're mistaken. I'm not cowering in fear or fright as you imagine. I am merely pragmatic considering I have waited two years for the vehicle to be delivered and I know that if it's stolen the insurance company will not payout for a replacement vehicle. It will payout what I paid but a slightly used replacement will cost more than what I am about pay due to the constrained market for these vehicles. As for your circumstance, I'm glad you have come to a reasoning that is suitable to you.
XSE AWD. I don't think options/models matter with the Sienna. Rather, Toyota is very behind on its hybrid vehicle production. The Sienna is only available as a hybrid.
I mean it depends. In Toronto you could do that (and I usually agree with you about say, home security), but then you don't really choose where you get to park your car every time. And in a way I'd be more stressed to know that I could lose my car if I parked it somewhere that I don't know, and that I can't do anything about it once it gets stolen, versus just putting 2 locks.
But again, I totally agree with you about the weirdness of people going full military compounds in residential areas.
Because car manufacturers have such a clear decision making role in the legal and judicial process of a place like Milwaukee. It can't be that the government simply realized that they aren't legally obliged to deal with any problems the populace have and simply let them eat cake in a 21st century way.
In some places in the US, you can leave your doors open and car unlocked and no one will touch it. Perhaps a friendly neighbour may remind you, but that's about it.
As much as some narrative wants us to think, we don't need to be forced to live in effectively the same conditions as a maximum-security prison in order to have no crime.
Cars (and other things) being easy to steal isn't the problem.
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower and blame Kia for this, blame the NHTSA for making it legal to skimp out on immobilizers in the first place. Regulations matter!
