:smack:
We’re having a rash of this in my area, and it happened to my friend’s 30-year-old son over the weekend. :rolleyes: He said, “But I was just running in to get cigarettes!” (at 11pm in a dicey neighborhood, no less!)
No matter how brief your errand is, shut off the ignition and take the keys with you. The time you use will be more than made up by the reduced inconvenience.
I thought the only people that did this were setting up bait cars.
Nope - and the officer who came to the store said it was the 4th one stolen from that particular store in the past week.
Have you checked to see if their are any chainsaws hanging from a tree near the running car?
My co-worker has mentioned more than once how someone “broke into” her mom’s car and stole her change. And then how her mom had left the truck unlocked. Um, I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means.
Did the truck contain the keys to the car? :dubious:
:smack: car = truck
I should just put “vehicle”.
How is this different from “Don’t wear sexually suggestive clothes and get intoxicated if you don’t want to get raped”? Shouldn’t the focus be on the behavior of the thief, not the thieved?
It’s illegal to leave a car running without a driver in the car in Akron Ohio. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s common law in many cities.
Yeah focus on the thief, but cite the driver for this just to drive home how stupid the driver was.
Keep your lock clicker separate from the ignition key.
Then you can leave the car running. Press the clicker and the car is safe for a few minutes while you’re in the convenience store.
I’ve done this for years. Lock clickers make it so fast and easy. There’s no excuse not to lock the car. Even if you’re only away from it for a couple minutes.
Cars can be jimmied open. So take the key out if you’re going to be in the store for awhile.
It’s a state law. they just ticked someone in my area for it.
I was at a neighborhood watch meeting this evening, and the local cop said “I want to thank you all for your confidence that the police department has scared all the criminals out of town, and that you believe that we will immediately find your car, your purse, your laptop and any other valuables you had left there, but would you please just lock your car!”
Of course the thief did something terrible, but why make it so much easier for him (or her; we’ve seen that too) to do it?
Women who aren’t intoxicated and wearing suggestive clothing get raped too, and so do men.
My car (Honda Accord with a smart key) won’t allow me to lock the doors with the fob/handle while the car is running. On the one hand, I assume (but could be wrong) the engine will cut out of the car is put into gear* if the fob isn’t in the vehicle. OTOH, I’d rather the person didn’t even attempt it, especially since there’s times when I need (yeah, yeah, ‘want’) to just run into a gas station or some other similar place, while the car is in full view the entire time, but my daughter is in the car. However, it’s either too hot or too cold for me to shut it off while for the few minutes that I’ll be away.
I really don’t understand why I can’t lock it while the fob is out. It’s either a conflict or an oversight when they manufactured the fob to make it not be able to lock the key in the car and/or something with the alarm, but there’s really not good reason for it. A little bit of extra coding in the software should allow for what is a fairly common situation.
While we’re at it, this car also can’t unlock the steering wheel if the battery dies. Yes, I know, there’s the thing in the thing to unlock the shifter, but a pin is set in the steering column via an electric solenoid. If you don’t have any battery, it won’t retract. I even asked a service tech and he suggested, should I find myself in that situation, just pushing it the car out of the parking spot to jump it. But think about how often you’re in a parking spot with the wheels still cranked over from making that tight turn. Nothing in his service manual mentioned any way to deal with this**. The only thing he could come up with was to call a tow truck since they’ll have extra long jumper cables that will reach that far. I love my Honda, but again, that seems like an oversight.
*I have a stick shift car, I would assume the manual version of ‘put the car in gear’ is ‘depressing the clutch pedal’.
**Now that I think about it, one of those small batteries that plug into the cigarette lighter, that they use to keep your computer and radio powered up when they change your (regular) battery, might just be enough to unlock the steering and enough of the bluetooth/wifi/RFID features to get the car to recognize the fob.
Also, FTR, I believe it’s a ticketable offense to leave your unattended car running in my area as well. The only time I’ve really seen the local police enforce it was about 10 years ago during a rash of car burglaries.
It does seem odd to blame the victim. I can fully understand if the insurance company wants to differentiate how they deal with it, but it seems strange to me that the police ticket people for making themselves easy victims. As was said upthread, that would be like giving women tickets for wearing miniskirts or halter tops or daydrinking in college bars. Perhaps they could at least adjust the laws to make the someone less victim blaming and suggest that it’s a green thing.
This is why I always install a remote starter on my vehicles. You can keep it running but without the key in it it’s impossible to drive. They make one for stick shift cars too.
It would be more closely similar if women were leaving their suggestively-dressed bodies unattended, then complaining that their body bot raped while they were somewhere else.
That law includes the terms “curb or side of the highway”. Can one assume that this law has no teeth on private property?
Well I finally found the article and it was a Michigan man who got ticketed. The article stated we could get a ticket in Ohio even in our own driveway but I don’t know if that’s true. It’s not specific to location.
It does mention “curb or side of the highway” but it doesn’t say anything about private property being exempt so I don’t know if the curb and highway thing was the legislatures way of exempting private property.
Can’t see how they can tell you what to do with your own property while it’s on your own property and not a public roadway.
Welllllll… that would work if my car had a “clicker”. Not all of them do.
My truck does, but I guess my folks hammered into my head “never leave a running vehicle unattended” so thoroughly it just doesn’t feel right to me, I just turn the thing off, even for a brief errand.
It’s not just about theft - a running vehicle is more likely to wander off on its own, driverless, than a non-running car. So there’s a safety aspect, too. Yeah, yeah, it’s possible for a non-running car to roll away, too, but it’s a harder to accidentally leave at least an automatic transmission in gear with the vehicle not running - my automatics won’t let you pull the key out unless they’re in park. Turn it off and take the key with you they’re pretty safe.