Car alarms - no longer effective?

[DSdriver]

A young Police officer knocked on the door this morning to ask if I had heard or seen anything suspicious as a Ford Ranger was stolen from the lay-by outside our house. Well, if its alarm did go off we didn't notice. It may have gone off for a short while but we would have thought it was just someone forgetting they had set it. So, if all they are is a nuisance when they go off then they are not worth bothering with.

Discuss...

[messerschmitt owner]

disconnected on both XMs - I find it best to own cars people don't want to nick!

[Negative Creep]

No one pays any attention to them, and once they get older there's a potential for a lot of troublesome problems. I've always been of the belief that a large steering lock is the best deterrent

[Jack_Harpers_Teeth]

Always seen them as a neighbour annoyance device rather than a car theft deterrent, I agree a bloody big (visible) steering lock is the best of the lot.

[cobblers]

I love not having a car with an alarm, cos if you hear one going off you can sleep easy know it's not yours. Nobody pays any attention because 99% of the time they are false alarms. Same goes for house alarms.

 

First job every time I buy a car with an aftermarket alarm/immobiliser is to rip it straight out - they're usually fitted really badly, and I bet for every one car that an immobiliser stops someone driving off with, they cause about 500 no-starts for the actual owners.

 

Only thing worth having is either the factory fitted proper immobilisers (with the chip in the key), or a Disklok.

 

I always chuckle to myself a bit when I see someone (usually an old boy) messing about fitting a £10 monkey metal steering wheel lock to his brand new Honda Civic. There is literally almost zero chance of someone starting most post ~1995 cars without the actual key or thousands of pounds of dealer diagnostics equipment.

[Negative Creep]

I always chuckle to myself a bit when I see someone (usually an old boy) messing about fitting a £10 monkey metal steering wheel lock to his brand new Honda Civic. There is literally almost zero chance of someone starting most post ~1995 cars without the actual key or thousands of pounds of dealer diagnostics equipment.

 

 

Unless it's a BMW

 

http://pistonheads.com/xforums/topic.as ... +in+3+mins

[RobT]

I love not having a car with an alarm, cos if you hear one going off you can sleep easy know it's not yours.

 

Too right. Rover alarms have a tendency to go off all too easily I've found from experience.

[theorganist]

Rover alarms have a tendency to go off all too easily I've found from experience.

 

Same here, the alarm on my Rover 825 used to regularly go off in the middle of the night, much to my embarrassement and the annoyance of my neighbours!!

[Conrad D. Conelrad]

Alarm sirens should really be inside the cabin so that it's simply too uncomfortable for a thief to remain in there with it going off. You can set yourself up with a tracking device for the cost of a good alarm, I know which I'd prefer.

[Spiny Norman]

Agreed, car alarms are a PITA and in an ideal world would go the way of Eastenders, black Diesel Audis, Justin Bieber and telesales twats!

 

The trouble with car security features these days is that if they're any good they may well end up getting you whacked on the head with a baseball bat for your keys, or your house turned over.

Much as I love my two shiters, if some bugger wants them that bad he can have them, I'll not be putting up much of a fight for two cars that cost less than the price of a set of tyres on an X5.

One of my neighbours has an old MX5 and its alarm keeps going off at random times through the day and night, and it's only a matter of time before it goes off and he's not there to switch it off, and someone's going to break into the thing (slashed roof, broken window) to shut the fecker up!

 

The best car security is a decent visual deterrent like a steering wheel lock, cunning parking practices (park next to something nicer), and owning a car that has a 'starting technique'....

[Negative Creep]

There is no perfect defense, and if someone wants a car enough, tehy will get it. Be it with a screwdriver, breaking into your house or pulling it onto a low loader, there's always a way

[Albert Ross]

I saw this thread earlier. Walked past it a few times during the day, noticed nothing suspicious. I then heard a weird wailing noise. I then realised it was this thread making the noise. I carried about my business. It was only later, when other people got involved, that I felt it the right time to tell you that I saw someone tampering with it. He was a 6 footer, every inch a Dwarf, and he was a very pale skinned black youth, must have been nearly 90 she was, only had one leg, and they were wearing a pair of white moccasins. Ramble blether etc. Nurse!

[Lord Sterling]

A couple of years ago when I still had my E-reg 825 Sterling, some little bastard tried to steal it one night, the all-neighbour waking alarm must have given the little twat a fright as he ran like Linford Christie on fire. As soon as I rang the cops they were there within 5 mins in a T5 zipping around everywhere looking for the sod. The little arsewipe did do some damage to my car by bending the door back as seem to have inserted some bar in between the door and pillar, the door was bent back. When I bent it back to its original position it was never the same, lots of wind whilstling into the cabin and at worsed water coming in through where it had been damaged (Found this out in a car wash)

 

Next day a Policeman in the same T5 came around to spek to me and advised me that whilst an alarm is indeed effective and will stop the car being nicked, its best to get some visual deterrent.

 

Stickers saying 'this car is alarmed' (at what exactly?) isnt as effective as it once was. Its easy to pick up a couple of Moss Security stickers or whatever and wang them up on your car, an alarm is great and will scare off potential robbing twats but only after they have damaged pretty much most of your door trying to get into the thing. A visual deterrent, in my opinion, is probably just as effective, fair enough it wont stop your car getting hiabed but it will stop opportunist car thieves having a go, because lets face it, they dont want to be sitting there for 5 minutes trying to work out how to remove your Krooklok or whatever.

 

As said, I do agree that if someone wants your car bad enough, they will get it. Its just a sad fact of life unfortunately.

[j-j]

Hahaha! AlbertRoss!

 

Well, What about the use of alarms to deter monkeys from breaking into a car just to steal whatever (might) be in it? Maybe this is a better use?

 

About 5 weeks ago I got up one Sunday morning and wandered over to the nice sunny front window. It's afirst floor flat and the Xantia was parked on the street below - I casually noticed the driver's door was simply ajar... being a shiter, the first thing I thought wasn't "some little cunt has broken into my precious shite heap" no, it was " can that happen"? i.e can something go wrong with your central locking or door lock to cause it to pop open... no was the answer I gave myself.. I went down to find it had been broken into sure enough but the hadn't smashed the glass, simply broken into via the door lock, not damaging the barrel but instead bending the handle surround enough to reveal a little gap and then got a hacksaw blade with a notch on it and used that to pull the rod up (I reckon) as I noticed that all 4 doors had conveniently opened for the intruders. They had almost legitimately opened it!

 

I'm getting to the point. The point is that the factory alarm wasn't on because there had been an ongoing shite problem with it - it was causing an electrical fault to keep the indicators stuck on all the time even after you locked it or when started and driving. The only solution was to put off the alarm and pull out the alarm fuse. It had been like that for weeks. The central locking worked with the key but the alarm gets armed by the remote (with the fuse out the alarm goes off even if you open on the remote) so the break in didn't set off the alarm. Luckily I don't leave anything of value in there and generally scrotes don't steal old diesel shitters. Little fux did take my new (albeit 5.99) driving aviators out of H&M and oddly, stole a crappy halfords phone charger and very oddly, stole a little packet from the glove box containing the standard Xantia replacement clutch plastic clip (why?) I suppose they HAD to steal something. The key thing is I had no idea the car had been broken into until next morning - it could have happened while I was sitting near the window or sommin. Had the siren went off though I'd have been down there and casually opened the boot to get the can of black undersealant to spray in their face.

 

So now the alarm and deadlocks are used since they seem to work OK for now. I think car alarms still have a purpose for that reason anyway. Hopefully they'll not touch it now as it's known as the shite heap with nothing in it..

[Cavcraft]

I saw this thread earlier. Walked past it a few times during the day, noticed nothing suspicious. I then heard a weird wailing noise. I then realised it was this thread making the noise. I carried about my business. It was only later, when other people got involved, that I felt it the right time to tell you that I saw someone tampering with it. He was a 6 footer, every inch a Dwarf, and he was a very pale skinned black youth, must have been nearly 90 she was, only had one leg, and they were wearing a pair of white moccasins. Ramble blether etc. Nurse!

 

[cobblers]

We've got the technology nowadays to do it, but nobody really sells anything that does it quite so straightforwardly.

 

All we need is a PIR sensor inside the vehicle sensing anyone in it, which wirelessly sets off an alarm in a box which you leave next to your bed so you can be woken up and stumble down the stairs with your knackers hanging out of a hastily donned dressing gown, to yell some obscenities out of the front door while some smackhead runs off down the drive with your stereo.

[Albert Ross]

Fuck that.... one requires time to don full "Ninja" and kick the living shit out of the little cunts. No repeat offenders though.

[garbaldy]

Fuck that.... one requires time to don full "Ninja" and kick the living shit out of the little cunts. No repeat offenders though.

 

 

Would that be in a beverly hills ninja styley

is it not a bit dangerous confronting the smack head towrags nowadays as they usually come tooled up do they not.

[Des]

I think car alarms completely lost their effectiveness in the 80s and 90s. when in the city you could hear a false alarm somewhere at any time of the day or night. Various overpriced trash by the likes of Moss had a common flaw, they detected voltage drop, sensitive enough to see the draw from a courtesy lamp when a door opens, and also from the multitude of poor connections where installed by clowns.

There was a particular metal bodied unit that used to be main dealer fitted by the likes of VW, Rover, landrover, Toyota and various others, some came with a factory loom and worked, others came with a universal one to be fitted by a monkey. I did a lot of Toyota breakdowns where the immobiliser bit would be twisted wires and black tape behind the ignition switch.

I do wonder why alarms need immobilisers built in.

The things are useful if you park outside your bedroom window, but equally effective would be a relay wired between the horn and courtesy lamp, with a cut out switch hidden in the grill.

[SambaS]

There is a Saxo where my mate works that sounds it's alarm a couple of times everytime you go passed it. I like that, I want one on my XR3.

[Pillock]

There's a guy where I used to work with one of those "warn-away" alarms on £500 worth of Focus LX. It's utterly utterly pointless, and extremely irritating when he parks right out the front of the building so 1000+ people walk past it every day.

 

Alarms themselves are pointless. They won't stop someone having your satnav or stereo, since that action takes all of 20 seconds and you won't even be twitching your curtains. Or they'll go off so many times you'll ignore it anyway. I live on a main road and it's become habit to press the little button inside the offside B pillar (on most VAGs) when exiting the car, it turns the alarm off (or at least the ultrasonics). Saves the alarm going off 3-4 times a night.

[Spiny Norman]

The alarm on my old Merc is so annoying I wish I could switch the damn thing off altogether.

It's one of these infra red things that needs you to very accurately point at the receiver in the rear view mirror (no casually disarming this sucker as you walk up to it.) and often needs a couple of goes so you look like a real spanner standing at the driver's door aiming the plipper up at the mirror. (And yes it's a new battery with plenty of juice in it, it just is that bad)

Then if you don't start it up within a few seconds it comes on again and the only way to get it going is to re-arm it and disarm it again!