If you have your car at the mall or are in a big city parking garge, sure it doesn't do much.
If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car.
My town has a population a little over 300 people, we have one resident that is... not well... that rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter and pounds on peoples doors screaming that the government is coming (he did this Saturday to a woman who finally called the county sheriff), a few weeks ago he pulled a battery out of a forklift at a local business's dock and proceeded to smash it on security camera, rides up to people that are out and about screaming nonsense at them, etc. Then factor in "kids being kids", the people that were spotlight poaching deer from the highway - shooting in the direction of houses - a month or so ago, etc and car alarms are just one of those handful of things that actually do come in handy in some places.
Even in high school in the early 2000s I had someone break into my car in the driveway at night in a cookie-cutter edition and go through my car. With an alarm we'd have known they were doing it.
Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.
Then my mother's boyfriend passed away around the same time. Someone flat out stole his decades old beater out of the driveway at night, again an alarm would have alerted them to it. Unfortunately for the thief the brakes barely worked and they didn't get very far before plowing into another car and taking off on foot.
Car alarms definitely serve a purpose, and I don't need Popular Mechanics to justify them or not.
> Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.
Holy cow, US really is a bizzare place. With your level of wages and your low prices of gas, the value of the gas stolen was an equivalent of 2-4 hours of minimum wage labor? And yet someone went through this trouble and risked jail for it.
I think you are way over estimating the level of prosperity of the poor throughout the US. There are people around me that live in literal garden shed shacks built with scavenged construction scraps and garbage. Go into big cities and look at how many people live on the streets.
I've also had something similar happen to me. When I was a university student staying at the campus dorms, I'd park my car outside my dorm building for most weekdays until I'd use it on the weekends to drive home, run errands across town, etc. Once when I came back to my car after a week of it being parked it was totally dead and reeked of gasoline - someone had snuck under my car, drilled into my gas tank, and drained the fuel into a gas can below. Getting the gas tank replaced was about USD$1,200 worth of damages and I doubt the campus police ever tracked down the person that did it.
However, the circumstances were probably different than most gas thefts. This took place during the winter in a place known for brutally cold winters, so if you're living in your car then having gas is the difference between freezing to death or not. Apparently it was not that uncommon, the campus police seemed like they were dealing with a pattern of these kinds of thefts.
It's really not a lot of trouble - and, presumably, the perpetrator may not be able to easily get a job for a variety of reasons - such as prior felonies, untreated mental health issues, etc - and for those same reasons, likely doesn't care too much about the fact they're risking further jail.
No disrespect in the slightest - but you're thinking into it too much, haha. Things like this are very common in the MidWest/South and such. US is quite a bit of a shithole for some, sad reality. Life is often cold and hard in general though.
> If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car.
That really depends if you're close enough to the car, or in a building that makes it easy to hear noises coming from a parking lot. If I go to a mall or a big box store, I'm not going to hear my car alarm going off and other people are going to largely ignore it (since they've experienced so many false alarms in the past).
Car alarm systems should be silent and sent an alert to your phone so that you know someone is doing something to your vehicle and can check on it in a timely fashion.
99% of car alarms from my experience are either people backing into cars, false alarms, or in my case, my truck being a POS because I had a key but not a key fob.
It’s 100% in my experience. I don’t think anyone I know would hear a car alarm and think someone is stealing a car. They would ignore it if it isn’t their alarm, cussing out the owner of the car for causing a disturbance, or cuss themselves out for accidentally hitting the button on the remote.
That might be in the city, but here in a rural setting you and your neighbors are most likely to go "something is wrong" and start looking outside, if not going outside to investigate. It's quiet enough that hearing 2 cars drive down the road in an hour is out of the ordinary.
Passersby won’t deter the criminal. In places like the USA or Latin America where criminals are believed to possess guns, passersby wouldn’t want to risk getting shot for the sake of some stranger’s vehicle.
Even in Europe, if passersby in the big cities saw e.g. a bike thief taking an angle grinder to a bike lock, they are unlikely to intervene. It would just be asking for trouble.
Right, that’s why I mention that that is the theory. In practice it is not a great deterrent, but it will deter some none the less because it brings attention to something happening.
I've owned a car in a city, a high density suburb, and a low density suburb (all USA). I had the one non-alarmed car as a teenager in the low density suburb. It was broken into in the quiet residential driveway. In the city and the high density suburb, I have only ever had false alarms.
Maybe the answer is to give the user the option to arm the alarm or not when exiting, with equal friction (i.e. separate "lock" and "lock+arm" buttons on both the door and the fob).
The bulk of the incidents weren't in this town, my wife and I have only lived here since November. The bulk of the events were in Indianapolis, IN and Greendood, IN. One year in Indy someone even stole a bunch of copper from Gleaner's Foodbank damaging the refrigeration system spoiling 464k USD in food https://www.dispatch.com/article/20070731/NEWS/307319840
Crime is everywhere, crime is random, and just about no person/business/charity is safe.
The bike guy is here in the small town, and on the town Facebook group since early November we've seen a dozen encounters with him, several of which have resulted in property damage. A car alarm is a nice thing to me with this guy pedaling around because it's quiet enough us and the neighbors would wake up to a car alarm, find it highly out of the ordinary, and start looking out windows.
I mean, it gets down to about -17F here in the winter. And we're pretty rural. Town is all of 0.38 square miles and he'll ride his bike for miles and miles down US 40 through farm country on the shoulder.
While screaming about the government coming for everyone and shouting random profanities.
Did you know that's largely because of all of the dedicated bicycle paths/lanes it has? That's a lot different than a rural farm town with no shoulders of note on the roads that only see snow cleared (and sees no salting of the majority of the roads) if someone in the neighborhood happens to have a plow on their truck and clears a path out to the highway for their own household.
If you live in the rest of the United States, which is spread out and some quite rural, a car alarm can quickly notify you someone is messing with your car.
My town has a population a little over 300 people, we have one resident that is... not well... that rides his bicycle around even int he dead of winter and pounds on peoples doors screaming that the government is coming (he did this Saturday to a woman who finally called the county sheriff), a few weeks ago he pulled a battery out of a forklift at a local business's dock and proceeded to smash it on security camera, rides up to people that are out and about screaming nonsense at them, etc. Then factor in "kids being kids", the people that were spotlight poaching deer from the highway - shooting in the direction of houses - a month or so ago, etc and car alarms are just one of those handful of things that actually do come in handy in some places.
Even in high school in the early 2000s I had someone break into my car in the driveway at night in a cookie-cutter edition and go through my car. With an alarm we'd have known they were doing it.
Several years later I had someone crawl under my truck, cut the fuel line, and after taking all the gas they could get using a piece of tape to try and hold it back in place (I actually had this in my Facebook memories yesterday), a car alarm may have alerted me to that.
Then my mother's boyfriend passed away around the same time. Someone flat out stole his decades old beater out of the driveway at night, again an alarm would have alerted them to it. Unfortunately for the thief the brakes barely worked and they didn't get very far before plowing into another car and taking off on foot.
Car alarms definitely serve a purpose, and I don't need Popular Mechanics to justify them or not.