Archive for the ‘theft’ Category

In any normal vehicle, a slight drain on the battery is no big deal. But if you have a hybrid—or, for that matter, if you have a finicky old British roadster in the garage that needs to be hooked up to a trickle charger all the time—you want to minimize what's tapping into your power. That's why LoJack has announced a new self-powered stolen-vehicle recovery system, aimed at hybrid vehicles, collector vehicles, and future electric models.

Though it's not yet clear what the energy source will be for the "self-powered" system, LoJack says that this next-generation system—set to become available late next year—will allow more flexibility in...

We have some good news. Even last year's start of the recession wasn't enough to reverse the downward trend in auto theft. The number of registered vehicles in the U.S. has doubled over the past 20 years, yet the overall vehicle theft rate has fallen—12.7 percent just from 2007 to 2008.

According to the FBI, there were 956,846 motor-vehicle thefts in 2008, down significantly from 1,095,769 thefts in 2007 and 1,237,851 thefts in 2004. Thefts reached a peak in 1991, when a total of about 1.66 million vehicles were stolen.

Overall, the rate of vehicle thefts per 100,000 people has gone from 659 in 1991 to 315 today, and adjusted for the...

Call us crazy, but if someone took a mobile phone, a briefcase, or a handheld GPS navigation system out of our car--even if it were unlocked--we'd call that theft.

The police in London's Richmond neighborhood take a different view.

When they see valuables left in plain sight in unlocked cars, they've been removing them and leaving notes for drivers to retrieve them at Twickenham police station.

Police say it's a tactic to tackle thefts from cars, which have risen 40 percent in the last year. And they say just 25 cars were checked, with only a single item removed thus far.

Still, British legal experts say  the practice is dubious, and the...