“Why the Hell Do They Still Make Car Alarms? They Add to Noise Pollution While failing to Prevent Car Theft. It’s Time for Them to Go.”, 2015-09-24 (; backlinks):
…So in the car alarm, we have a device that’s both ineffective and annoying. It’s also unneeded: it’s nearly impossible to start a modern car without the key. If anyone wants to steal a car nowadays, says Robert Sinclair of AAA, “they’re going to have to bring a truck.”
Starting in 1996, auto manufacturers were required to equip vehicles with OBD-II, a computerized engine diagnostics system that links the engine systems in a car (it’s that port to the left of the steering column where mechanics plug in to asses car issues). That’s when cars went from having flat metal keys to the keys with RFID immobilizers. No longer could you go to a hardware store to duplicate a key, and hot-wiring didn’t work like the movies. Car theft rates have been since declining ever since, going from about 1.6 million annual incidents in the 1990s to around 800,000 in 2014, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which analyzes crime like break-ins and grand theft auto…No one steals radios anymore, and cars have gotten impossible to steal (except via sophisticated hacking), which brings us to a wonderfully evolved era where, it seems, we’ve stifled some noise pollution, and gotten rid of something that doesn’t work.
…I asked automakers how the alarms on their 2016 models work. Generally, the only way they trigger is if the car has been locked and the doors are opened from the inside—that is, if someone breaks the window and opens the door from the inside handle, then it’ll sound. That’s a big change from cars a few years back. Davis Adams, who works at Honda and drives an S200024ya, told me about a Lotus Elise he used to own that had a motion sensor. “If you locked the door, and moved your hand in the open air”, he said, “the alarm would go off. So if you left a dog in the car, or someone leaned in the open convertible to look, it’d trigger the alarm.”
If you’ve been hearing fewer errant car alarms lately, there’s a reason. Back in the early 2000s, advocacy groups took legal action to make alarms less sensitive and quieter. Manufacturers have since, it seems, taken heed. “My impression is that there are far fewer false alarms now, and that this started around that same time, when the [New York] City Council held some hearings on the issue”, says Professor Mateo Taussig-Rubbo of SUNY Buffalo Law School. He authored a 2003 paper called “Alarmingly Useless: The Case for Banning Car Alarms in New York City”. “I would speculate that the industry, especially the aftermarket sector, which may have had more problems, made the alarms less sensitive in order to get out ahead of any potential legislation”, he says. Mercifully, that seems to be correct, (though you can still find it in some cars like the 2015 Escalade).