To help catch car thieves police sometimes setup a “bait car” which is actually intended to be stolen. They rig the car up gadgets such as GPS units so that after the car is stolen they will be able to follow the thief, arrest them, and retrieve their precious new car.
Of course that is how it is supposed to work. In Dallas, Texas that wasn’t exactly the case. The police had rigged the bait car with a GPS unit and they were “happy” to see it get stolen. The problem was that the GPS unit then malfunctioned and the thief got away.
The thing that shocks me the most is that they only have one GPS unit inside the car. I would have thought that they would plan for a unit to fail and so they would have put other tracking devices inside as well. I mean really, how often does something actually work when you want it to…especially electronics!
News Source: All Headline News [via Gizmodo]
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Tags: General
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Just last night I saw something on tv about something similar to this. instead of a GPS system, the car would shut off 15 seconds after it was stolen and the doors would lock. I think this way is a little better than a GPS system.
You would think they would also equip the car with Lojack as a fail-safe back-up. As for the car turning off and doors locking, that happened here in Phoenix and the theif ended up kicking out the window and got away before police could get him. They got their new car, less a driver side window though.
they must not have been keeping a good eye on him haha
I think that they may use a GPS system if they want to track where the thief goes. Maybe there have been a lot of stolen cars lately and they want to see if one person is taking them all. I’m sure they have some reasoning behind just using a GPS, well, at least I hope they would.
Actually, mechanical things are more likely to fail than electronics (unless of course your process is so small that stray alpha particles will flip your bits). The feeling that electronics devices fail so much is because you trust/depend on them much more - so you expect more. When it does fail, you REALLY notice.