For making a lot of noise.
A car is stolen every twenty-six seconds in the United States. Cars are easy to steal; they even have a built-in getaway system. The odds of your car being stolen are one in two hundred. You have a 13 percent chance of getting your car back. On average, the authorities are called to the scene only 1 percent of the time when a car alarm is triggered.
An educated guess would all but guarantee a car‘s (false) alarm is blaring somewhere in your town with no one thinking of stealing it. Rather than theft, you have a greater chance of vandalism happening to your door in the shape of someone’s annoyed boot print.
You can’t blame the inventor for this one: The product performs as advertised. A car alarm won’t promise the security of your car; it only guarantees that it will make a lot of annoying noise if someone ever tries to jack it (and plenty more times when a garbage truck rumbles by). The liability on this one goes to everyone who still uses car alarms. They so don’t work. They just make an irritating racket and give people headaches. It has gotten to the point where everyone just tunes them out. Here is an idea: Why not make a silent alarm that alerts your phone and gives GPS coordinates when a thief steals your car? Then an iPhone app could automatically pop up and give an “Electrocute or Eject?” option. Something more like David Hasselhoff’s old ride. This way you may actually be able to get your car back and then catch, prosecute, AND have some fun with the car thief.
Here are more effective car theft deterrent systems to try before you buy KITT from NBC:
• Kill switch
• LoJack
• An empty gas tank
• A chauffeur
• Snipers
• Or just stop paying your parking tickets and the police will attach the ultimate antitheft device—the boot.
• And if none of this works, just take the bus!