Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> Frankly the entire system is way overengineered. A thief simply
> walks up to the car and smashes the window with a rock, he does
> not bother fiddling around with sniffing RKE signals.
LOL! Kind of like when Indiana Jones proved you don't have to learn
martial arts or how to handle a machete as long as you carry a loaded
gun around with you.
Remember the saying: "Locks are for honest people". IOW - many people
would steal if something's laying out there, but a large percent of
people will, for several different reasons (laziness, some minimum level
of conscience, etc.) not steal if they have to do some conscious act
that crosses a certain line (like picking or cutting a lock or breaking
a window). IOW - adding one more layer of security will be effective to
some degree on the statistics - a certain percentage of would-be crooks
would be deterred by the over-engineered system who otherwise would go
to the trouble of obtaining and using some kind of simple code-breaking
machine (on the pre-'96 system). But yeah - there will always be the
gutsier s*** who will break the window no matter what.
I complain all the time about how cars are over-engineered in some areas
these days, and that we've reached the point of dimini****ng returns in
some areas of technology use, but in this case, if you think about it,
the development costs of such systems are amortized over practically all
new cars on the planet (I'm assuming the algorithms and chips all come
from a handful of manufacturers), and the per-unit costs are probably
not increased much at all. IOW, there is some slight benefit overall,
but the cost is almost zero compared to a, say, pre-'96 system. It's
not like some feel-good systems that are on our cars now or in the
future from which the benefits are questionable but the added cost per
vehicle is one or more hundreds of dollars.
Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')
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