
What Car Thieves Think of the Club (2010) - caminante
http://freakonomics.com/2010/06/08/what-car-thieves-think-of-the-club/
======
mrob
If improving your own security produces a negative externality then education
also produces a negative externality. You're "harming" other people by
becoming more employable than them. Personal hygiene produces a negative
externality because you might become more attractive than somebody. Physical
fitness produces a negative externality because you might get chased by a bear
and not be the slowest. Doing anything that improves your chances in
competition counts, and there are very few areas of life with no competition.

IMO such a loose definition is meaningless, and the word should be reserved
for cases where you are actually doing harm. In the case of improved car
security it's the car thieves who are doing harm.

~~~
tlb
It's better to define "externality" as including all impacts on everyone but
yourself, and accept that some amount of negative externality is inevitable.
That allows you to differentiate cases like (in the article) Lojack, which
produces a positive externality, from the Club which theoretically produces a
negative externality.

~~~
mrob
You can already distinguish between positive and zero. If you lump zero in
with negative then you're losing information, and you're violating common
sense in a way that makes people lose respect for the field in general.

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austincheney
I have the world's most effective anti-theft device, there is research on
this, in my car and this device saved me thousands on the retail price of the
vehicle.

The mystery device is a manual transmission.

~~~
icelancer
My 1997 Civic was stolen despite having a manual transmission that sometimes
is faulty. I've also had two Honda del Sols stolen, both were stick shifts.
Doesn't seem to help all that much.

~~~
rwbt
The mid-late 90s Civics and Del Sols are highly sought after among Honda fans!
The ones with B18 VTEC motors even more so. That's why your cars were stolen
despite having a stick shift.

It's even worse for the Honda CRX.

~~~
mortenjorck
This may make sense in the context of the enthusiast market, but I somehow
doubt the average car thief is that tuned in to gearhead culture.

~~~
URSpider94
You’d be wrong. Car thieves aren’t stealing cars to re-sell them on a lot,
they are stealing them for parts for unscrupulous buyers, and street racers
are a great market.

I used to own an Acura Integra. The rear spoiler was ripped off several times
(carefully, so it could be re-attached to another car), and the car itself was
stolen twice - the first time it was recovered in one piece, the second time
it was a bare chassis without even wheels.

The Integra motor had a 10,000 rpm redline and had a cult following among
Honda enthusiasts. It could be retrofitted into any Civic.

~~~
nasredin
WRT the bare chasis Integra when the police called you how did they break the
news to you?

~~~
URSpider94
From my recollection, they didn’t have much to say. The car was abandoned in
Hillside, NJ just outside of Newark, at the time at least car theft was
rampant there so the police were pretty matter of fact about the whole thing.
The car got impounded, and it felt like the impound lot and the police
department were conspiring to keep it there (like, to get the car out, you had
to get a release from the police department on the other side of town from an
office with very limited hours, which was only good for one day, and then make
it back across town before the impound lot office closed for the day.

I recall my insurance company ended up paying more than the car was worth
(before the theft) in impound fees, before even they could get it out.

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msluyter
Back in the 90s I had a club (a girlfriend bought it for me for Valentine’s
Day, because it was red.) After a while I stopped locking it when I put it on,
reasoning that if someone was determined enough to see it and still break into
the car thinking they could get past it then there was no real point in
actually locking it.

~~~
gerry_shaw
I used to do that as well. One day I came back to my jeep and the club was
stolen but not the jeep. Wasn't sure what to make of that but laugh. Never
bothered getting another one.

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jasonboyd
I saw a car with the club the other day - this first I have seen in I can't
even remember how long. The car was in rough shape. Real rough. I mused to my
wife that perhaps the car was there to protect the club.

~~~
EB66
Generally speaking, older vehicles are much easier to steal than newer
vehicles. I have a friend with an 1980s Toyota truck who clubs it wherever he
goes, not because it's a nice truck, not because he can't afford to lose it,
but rather because it will definitely get stolen if he doesn't club it.
Without a club, his truck can be stolen in under a minute by any layman using
a little more than a flathead. Before he got the club, it was stolen multiple
times -- usually turning up a week later, abandoned somewhere, and/or used as
a shelter by a homeless person.

~~~
easyfrag
Adam Corolla tells a story of an old Nissan pickup he had when he was younger
and poorer. It was so easy to steal he wired in a hidden switch to power the
fuel pump, truck was stolen a couple of times and he would just walk a couple
of blocks to where it was abandoned. I believe he also painted the stereo
brown to as a deterrence to thieves looking for stereos to sell.

~~~
LyndsySimon
The fuel pump thing is very common for Jeep owners.

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V-2
For what it's worth, it reminded me of a passage in a novel (I can't remember
which one) by an Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan.

In the story he contained an observation on how in blockhouses people on the
first floor secure their balconies with bars to protect their flats against
burglars.

These bars, however, make for a perfect ladder right onto the balcony on the
second floor :) So then people on the second floor are forced towards doing
the same thing, and so on all the way up.

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khendron
I had a coworker who secured his car with a Club, and this is exactly what
happened. The thieves even left the club behind in his parking space. The next
night they came back and stole his rental.

~~~
enraged_camel
Damn. So what did he do to piss those guys off?

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tribby
it's been a long time since I've seen one, so maybe the lock has changed (used
to be a simple doubled sided wafer lock), but in the past it was a lot faster
to pick the club open than to saw through a steering wheel. see also the club
buster[1].

1\. [http://www.clubbuster.com/](http://www.clubbuster.com/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Funny how the About page markets this tool to:

    
    
      LOCKSMITHS
      TOW TRUCK OPERATORS
      AUTOMOBILE REPOSSESSION PROFESSIONALS
      FIREMEN & PUBLIC SAFETY SERVICES ....
    

Yeah, right :).

~~~
newman8r
Easy & FUN to use!

------
tomohawk
Most cars are stolen by non pro car thieves. They're stolen based on
opportunity and whether or not its in an area where under 25s might need
transpo. They're going to steal the easiest thing, because they're often just
looking for transpo.

We lived on a street frequented by under 25s at night and used clubs on our
cars. They were never stolen, but the neighbors who had easier to steal
vehicles such as Dodge Caravan were taken quite often.

You're not going to stop a pro.

~~~
anon4242
> You're not going to stop a pro.

The only thing stopping a pro is to have an uninteresting car. My idea is to
have a car good enough not to be easily stolen for a joyride but uninteresting
enough for a pro.

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anon2775
At one time in America, keys from one car would unlock, if not start, many
thousands of similar cars because of similar or same key bitting. It's
interesting that German cars of the same era were harder to break into because
of worse economics for lower classes, more car thefts and therefore more
secure vehicles... meanwhile American cars weren't really locked that much
because post-WW2 boom times were so good, and so, less theft, especially in
small towns where everyone knew each other and theft would risk becoming a
shunned criminal outlaw.

------
rmason
Knew a guy who used the club with his late model Corvette back in the
nineties. He went in a store and when he came out his Corvette was gone and
smack dab center of the parking spot he had was the club. Almost like the
thief was mocking him.

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Spooky23
IMO the club is absolute junk, but is probably enough to deter mosy entry
level kids who were taking cars to joyride in the 80s.

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V-2
_> And do not pass too quickly over the fact that a car company hires car
thieves for consultation. If you are a businessperson, do you regularly engage
those who wish to do you harm?_

It hardly shocks people when it's about cybersecurity.

I'd also nitpick about car thieves wishing to harm the car companies. They're
actually harming car owners, or possibly insurance companies. They do not
"wish" to harm car companies. It's arguably not even an _unintended side
effect_ of what they do.

Car companies might actually benefit from you having to buy another car once
yours is suddenly gone. Sure, the stolen one will be sold to someone else, but
on average the victim of the theft is wealthier than the person who'll buy
their stolen car - which essentially means more rather than less extra money
is likely to get pumped into the pockets of car companies at the end. (You
presumably had a good car, you can afford buying a new one - the person who
bought yours would have been unlikely to buy a new one anyway).

~~~
Noumenon72
The risk of theft lowers the expected value of having the car. I'll never buy
one of those $1000 bikes because of the risk of theft, nice as they might be.
I'll go to Wal-Mart.

------
njharman
People regularly confuse "security through obscurity" with "obscuring your
security". The first is bad, the second is powerful.

Even before I read about the hacksaw (long ago) I knew clubs by themselves
were bad cause they were visible. They reveal intel to the attacker. Intel the
attacker can take and, in safe environment, at their leisure, devise way to
defeat it. If the attacker doesn't know what countermeasures there are, (or
are common) they can't defeat them. GPS trackers can be hidden, but car
thieves know about them so they can counter (say by getting car into faraday
cage ASAP, or using radio wave detector to track it down and disable. So, you
have to be more creative, unusual.

Where the club could be useful is a honey pot. Put it on the worthless (to
you) car you want stolen so the more valuable (to you) car is skipped over.

Maybe bait car has secondary devices for tracking that thieves will be less
likely to look for since it had the club and and multiple defenses are
unexpected.

------
carapace
This touches on a pet peeve of mine: almost every person who uses the Club
puts it on wrong.

The long part of the bar is meant to go down and to the left between the door
and the floor, to make the steering wheel harder to turn.

Everybody attaches it with the long part sticking up in the air.

~~~
iambateman
When almost every person does it wrong, the problem isn’t the person.

~~~
andrewflnr
There's a limit to this principle. There's not always something you can fix to
prevent people from abusing your product or system.

Are the instructions for the Club bad, or what? I'm usually the first person
to say "you don't need to propose an alternative for your criticism to be
valid". I think in this case, however, where the validity of the criticism is
predicated in the existence of alternatives, you really need to give one.

~~~
xsmasher
Sounds like the club needs more "affordances" to help the user.

Maybe a sticker with ↑up↑ and ↓down↓ printed on it, in such a way that the
text is upside down if the club is locked incorrectly.

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hashfunktion
Interestingly, the article later admitted the club made it easier for the
autio thieves so it was a positive externality after all.

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CPLX
This is a just-so story. Sounds good, totally bereft of actual data or
analysis. Par for the course for freakonomics.

~~~
kbenson
It's a blog entry with an anecdote that came from a write in in response to a
story. You were expecting something else from a short blog post?

~~~
dizzystar
I think the parent is throwing shade on the book as well. Can't say I disagree
with the opinion.

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ndnxhs
How do companies find criminals to request help from?

~~~
tempestn
Convictions are public record, so it presumably wouldn't be too hard to reach
out to people when they're released from prison.

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stevespang
Yeah, we all knew this back in 1980's . . . successful thieves would actually
leave the club in the front lawn next to the curb as a laughing momento

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zepolen
Hidden sleeping gas canister that deploys when engine starts without a secret
switch deactivating (bluetooth or regular) - alerts you when it does.

Worst case you forget to turn it off and fall asleep a couple hours.

~~~
ada1981
Sleeping gas?

