That can’t possibly work as described by pkbites. GPS satellites have no capability whatsoever to transmit a specific signal to a specific location. Cars, especially 30 years ago, were not configured to accept any sort of “shutdown” signal, and adding such a capability would require far more than a $40 software change. That’s Star Trek TNG “press a lot of colored buttons and you can add photon torpedo capability to your ship” level of technobabble.
He’s either misremembering the presentation, or the presenters (who of course were trying to sell something to a bunch of non-technical police departments) were grossly misrepresenting their product. Or both.
The “shutdown” system would be the electric immobiliser already fitted to new cars for— what?— 20 or 30 years now? Can you even get your car insured if you don’t have one?
What that has to do with GPS is, of course, a good question.
I just purchased a car and I do not believe that there is any remote shutdown feature in it. Europe has mandated eCall when will notify emergency services in case of an accident. I don’t believe that there is any provision for mandatory disabling of the car.
But do they have the capability to accept a signal from an outside source to turn off the engine? A receiver that would work in whatever RF band the satellite would be transmitting in? And a way to identify just that car instead of the signal immobilizing every car within a half mile radius?
It’s not supposed to shut down your car remotely. It is supposed to keep the engine from running unless it receives the correct code from your car key, thus preventing your car from being stolen by someone quickly hot-wiring it.
The point is that, grosso modo, the engine is already wired to be shut down electronically. A $40 modification to receive some sort of optical or radio signal and respond to that might then not be a wholly unreasonable estimate.
ETA
Of course not, I am just pointing out that a system such as pkbites heard about is not utter science-fiction. Even he claimed that the system is only a concept and not being manufactured.
It’s not utter science fiction, but it’s completely impossible in the way he described it. You shine a laser on a car, and one of the currently orbiting GPS satellites immobilizes it, and all that takes is a software change in the car itself? Not even remotely possible.
With the right crowdfunding, I feel absolutely confident that I can develop a potato cannon that will be able to plug the exhaust(s) on any car at ranges up to 200 feet. The trick is to make it small enough to mount on the front of police cars. I’m thinking a tank of nitrogen to use as the propellant. It should be safe enough, as a potato that goes astray will just dent the trunk or carom off the rear glass.
I think an initial funding goal of $500K is reasonable. Can anybody help me with the LEO sales part?
Man I wish I could remember the name of the company so I could find their presentation video IF it’s on the web. It was pretty slick though and did say it used GPS to do this. Whether it also used another system I don’t remember.
Skeevy used car dealers “often attach GPS monitors and devices that can remotely keep cars from being started.” (cite). Yes, I realize that preventing starting is not the same as remote shutdown but if you’ve every watched an episode of “Baitcar” you know the PD can remotely shutdown a vehicle; one with which they have specifically enabled that technology. Therefore, the technology already exists to shutdown a car. The only piece I haven’t seen is being able to shutdown a ‘random’ specific car, based upon a license plate on it. That database should be relatively easy to build if all new cars were required to have shutdown technology installed in them. This of course assumes that the real license plate is on the car in question.
I’ve never watched an episode of “Baitcar”. Its IMDB page says:
So what you’re describing as “enabled that technology” really sounds like installing specific hardware in each and every car. Which is, again, beyond what pkbites described.
If skeevy used car dealers can remotely prevent your car from being started & if PD can close-proximity remotely shut down a moving car it’s not a huge leap to look up a license plate, find the specific VIN & corresponding shut down code & then enter that code into a special device inside the patrol car.
Based upon the below quote, I believe that is exactly what pkbites was talking about.
Again, the skeevy used car dealers and PD are installing special equipment in the cars that are not standard equipment. But pkbites specifically said only a software change is ncessary:
Your cite definitely describes some sleazy used car dealer behavior. It also notes that the capability to remotely prevent a car from starting when the buyer fails to make payments is described in the contract the buyer signs.
Technology that makes cars easier to repossess certainly makes it possible for people to buy cars who otherwise would be denied - or forced to pay more. Of course, more than a few of these really shouldn’t be buying a car because they don’t have the resources to keep up with payments, meaning the dealer will grab the car and soon re-sell it, pocketing the money previously paid.
I doubt pkbites remembers every detail of the police shutdown technology perfectly but who cares. Nearly every car on the road has a transponder system that allows you to unlock the doors by clicking a button. Door unlocking is controlled by the body control module (of whatever your carmaker calls it), which in turn is piped into a bus system that runs through the car. It would be a pretty trivial matter to link the bus system to the engine control unit (these are generally already connected for other reasons) and piggyback the door unlock receivers to instead disable the car. I’d be stunned if, after paying to program the system, it cost more than pennies to install in cars because it’s just lines of code. Then, the police cars would need a system to broadcast shutdown codes to fleeing cars. I’m guessing this is hundreds rather than thousands per patrol car. It might be only a bit more than the cost of a key fob, so $80 wouldn’t surprise me. Then, you need a system to securely transmit the shutdown codes to police when they need them. Cops already have encrypted laptops in their cars, so this isn’t magical technology either. There would also be costs to operate, secure, and maintain the database of car shutdown codes (which should be unique for each car). It’s true that this system doesn’t require GPS, so maybe that part of pkbites’s story was a red herring but a GPS tracker sure could help the police find the car they need to stop sooner. For what it’s worth, OnStar already has a system that works like this in car’s today, although it relies on a cellular connection rather than the door lock function. It also uses GPS receivers and the cell phone connection to report where the car is located.
So, the technology to remotely shut down a car is hardly pie in the sky. There could be a good discussion of whether this is a good idea if anyone is interested.
For what my opinion is worth, this sounds like a great idea, provided there are controls in place to keep police from abusing it. Perhaps police should be able to remotely shut down cars if there is a specialized warrant applying to the car, exigent circumstances (like an extremely dangerous pursuit) which would make it reasonable to stop a car without a warrant, or if lethal force is otherwise warranted against the driver of the car. In this case, shutting down the car would reduce the need for lethal force.
Yes, the system could be hacked. That’s pretty much the exact risk I face today by having a car that is operated solely by its clicker. I’ll see if I come to regret taking that risk.
Would that even work? .22 rounds aren’t particularly powerful. I highly doubt one of those rifles we used in summer camp for target practice would crack an engine block or penetrate a radiator.
Said skeevy used-car dealers and police departments, however, are shutting down a car they have previously handled, and they know exactly what car it is.
The number of cars I see on the road that have dealer plates, paper tags, mud-caked or otherwise unreadable plates, etc. (plus the unknown number that have perfectly readable plates that just don’t happen to belong to the car they’re currently attached to), would make looking up a VIN from a license plate less than certain. (Shutting down my respectable mother-in-law’s car under unknown circumstances just because her asshole neighbor has stolen her tags AGAIN would not be cool.) I don’t know what percentage of cars on the road have a VIN easily retrievable from the license plate, but I suspect it is quite a bit lower than a hundred percent. (Also note this anecdote from one car dealer/restorer that twenty percent of the cars they want to purchase have VINs that don’t quite match the paperwork, often being a digit off, or a B transcribed as 8 or something on that order; that sounds very high to me, but even a few percent would add to the difficulty.)
Asshole Neighbor wasn’t stealing license plates because he was planning to get in a car chase; he was just doing what was quick and easy. Buying a real and valid license plate takes real money; stealing one takes just a few minutes, and having a plate, any plate, on his car kept the cops from hassling him quite so much.
Anybody care to offer any guess on what percentage of the cars likely to be involved in car chases have good plates on them?
Handwaving away the development costs to focus on the installation is silly. Even a few lines of code is expensive to test in all of the scenarios you’d need to test that one to avoid liability. (If your car unlocks by random chance in the middle of your morning freeway commute, it’s inconvenient; if the engine dies on the freeway, it could be deadly.)
A remote starter, installed, usually runs $200-400, whether OEM or aftermarket. That’s not quite the same thing, of course, but perhaps similar enough for price comparisons.
I can start, stop, lock, and unlock my truck using my phone or Ipad and the system uses satellite. I could be anywhere on the planet and start my truck that’s parked somewhere else half-way around the globe with just the touch of a button. This all uses the free version of Onstar. It costs me nothing extra.
The technology the company claims to use exists. Why does it seem like such an impossibility to some of you?
Because you claimed it uses GPS satellites, and a laser, and a software change in the car, and nothing else. Onstar is extra onboard hardware, not software, which integrates a GPS receiver and a connection to the cellular phone network. That would have been a relatively expensive add-on to put into every car manufactured in the past 30 years, much more than $40/car.
And a GPS satellite cannot be used to send data to a car. Period. That’s not how it works. All a GPS satellite does is continually send out position & time data, so a receiver can determine its own position. Many GPS receivers do things with that data, including transmitting their position elsewhere, but that’s got nothing to do with the GPS satellites themselves. So your claim that you bounce a laser off the car and that somehow triggers something via GPS satellites is impossible.
Onstar works by determining it’s position via GPS satellite, then transmitting that position via the cellular network. So no, you couldn’t use that to turn off a car without installing extra hardware in the car.
It is clear some extra hardware would be required; without the company’s brochure it is difficult to gauge whether that would cost $40 as claimed or more like $400; if I wanted to buy a single Iridium SBD modem right now, I would have to pay at least $100-200. Nor is it clear from the description so far exactly what is the remote shutdown procedure. If the car detect being painted with a laser designator there is no need for any satellite communication, and if the car be equipped with a satellite transceiver why bother with a laser when I could indeed send commands from anywhere on the planet.
