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Car Thieves Could Be Stopped Remotely Speeding off in a stolen car, the thief thinks he has got a great catch. But he is in a nasty surprise. The car is fitted with a remote immobilizer, and a radio signal from a control center miles away will ensure that once the thief switches the engine off, he will not be able to start it again. For now, such devices are only available for fleets of trucks and specialist vehicles used on construction sites. But remote immobilization technology could soon start to trickle down to ordinary cars, and should be available to ordinary cars in the UK in two months. The idea goes like this. A control box fitted to the car incorporates a miniature cellphone, a micioprocessor and memory, and a GPS satellite positioning receiver.If the car is stolen, a coded cellphone signal will tell the unit to block the vehicle’s engine management system and prevent the engine being restarted. There are even plans for immobilizers that shut down vehicles on the move, though there are fears over the safety implications of such a system. In the UK, an array of technical fixes is already making life harder for car thieves. “The pattern of vehicles crime has changed,” says Martyn Randall of Thatcham, a security research organization based in Berkshire that is funded in part by the motor insurance industry. He says it would only take him a few minutes to teach a novice how to steal a car, using a bare minimum of tools. But only if the car is more than 10 years old. Modern cars are a far tougher proposition, as their engine management computer will not allow them to start unless they receive a unique ID code beamed out14 by the ignition key. In the UK, technologies like this have helped achieve a 31 per cent drop in vehicle-related crime15 since 1997. But determined criminals are still managing to find other ways to steal cars. Often by getting hold of the owner’s keys in a burglary. In 2000, 12 per cent of vehicles stolen in the UK were tak