Car Theft !

It is distressingly common to hear news items that deliver a fatal story of a car being pursued by police crashing into another vehicle and killing an innocent family.   Many people have observed one of these chases in action.   Screaming police sirens and the car being pursued moving at high speed with total disregard for pedestrians or other traffic, running red lights and often on the wrong side of the road.

Often the errant driver is a young man affected by alcohol or drugs.  Not only does this reduce his driving skill but the bravado encourages him to take risks in his desperation to avoid capture.  The driving behaviour verges on insanity - and in many cases the police abandon pursuit for safety reasons.

Car theft occurs across the entire price spectrum of makes and models.  It seems that price has nothing to do with security.  The top of the range cars are as easy to steal as those lows priced basic models and theft avoidance has shown no signs of improvement in recent years.

Past promises of car security have been a failure.   The era of the steering lock was supposed to be the answer.  Once the engine was turned off and the steering directed towards the kerb it would be impossible to steer the car.   In a matter of days the thieves had discovered how to overcome that obstacle.

More recently the law required all new cars to be factory fitted with an immobilizer. This was designed to interrupt power to start the engine but again the thieves learned how to isolate the immobilizer in a matter of seconds.  There have been no credible advances in car safety in recent years.

It seems unbelievable that in an age when we can build and maintain an orbiting space station and we have set foot on the moon we are unable to secure a car from thieves driving it away.  Car security is simply not in the best interests of the car manufacturers.  Their industry is based on a form of fashion that sees cars replaced frequently to bring new innovations to market and to extol design change.

It is technically possible to make a car extremely difficult to steal but it involves both the cost and the degree of inconvenience to the owner to bother setting that safety procedure in place whenever they leave the car - and restoring it mobility when they return.

That is never likely to eventuate - if it remains optional.  The only way this will be achieved will be by the government calling for engineering ingenuity to develop a system that meets that criteria, with the reward that it will become law - and be required in all new cars in Australia as part of the registration process.

The car industry will then be refused entry to Australia unless their vehicles meet the required theft standard, and it is quite likely that this would quickly become the world standard.  That is probably the only way we will ever achieve safety from car theft.