Putting the Brakes on Theft : As Car Security Equipment Gets More Sophisticated, So do Thieves
As car radio repairmen working in North Hollywood in the late 1970s, Rudy T. Sanders and Lee Fleishman liked to tinker. In 1978, they bought a small batch of circuit boards with $107 they had earned building car radio relays on their kitchen table. The partners made several hundred car alarm timers in a garage and sold them for $15 apiece.
That garage business has grown during the past nine years into Vehicle Security Electronics, which owns an 11,000-square-foot factory in Chatsworth and employs 50 people. The radio repair jobs, Sanders recalls, “gave us the experience to realize there weren’t a lot of sophisticated products on the marketplace.”
The nation’s $400-million car alarm industry is booming, fed by rising auto thefts and technological advances. A handful of California firms, mostly in the San Fernando Valley, have captured much of the growth by building increasingly sophisticated car alarm systems. Relying on technical ingenuity and frequent design improvements, area manufacturers have fought off the East Asian firms that dominate virtually every other segment of the U.S. consumer electronics market.
“The growth in the (car) security industry has fallen to the California companies, making electronic product. . . . Ten years ago they were just garage operators, and now they have payrolls of 100 people,” said John Runnette, former publisher of Redondo Beach-based Installation News, a monthly magazine for the auto accessories trade.
The U.S. market for electronic car alarm systems has grown by up to 30% a year for the past three years, Runnette said. About 35% of the systems now sold are made in California, while imports make up less than a third of the industry, he added.
“We’ve been growing steadily for the last three years at a 25% (annual) rate. . . . We’re probably going to have 30% this year,” said Howard L. Miller, president of Crimestopper Security Products in Simi Valley. Since the company began making alarms in 1979, it has expanded its work force to 50 from 10, said Miller, who declined to release sales figures.
California Leads Nation
The U.S. market for car security shows little sign of saturation. A study two years ago found that only 6% of U.S. cars less than a year old carried any anti-theft precautions, including car alarms or even an etching of the vehicle’s identification number on the windows, Runnette said.
That percentage probably stands between 7% and 8% now, he added. “That’s why it’s a great business.”
California firms have been the first to develop and sell remote control transmitters, keyboard alarms and even panic buttons, which allow the user to set off a car alarm from a distance if menaced in a parking lot or along a darkened street. Top-quality alarm systems, which typically cost more than $500 including installation, are made mostly by in-state firms.
Southern California businesses have an advantage in the car security industry--they’re in a region with a fast-growing, increasingly sophisticated auto theft industry that tests even the best systems. According to the California Highway Patrol, auto thefts were up 16.5%to 208,064 in California last year and up 13.9%to 103,683 in Los Angeles County alone.
Businesses as well as individuals have been affected. Starlite Limousine, a Sherman Oaks-based company with a fleet of 20 rental limousines, was losing two or three cars a year to theft, plus a similar number of break-ins, until it began putting alarm systems in every limousine in 1980, supervisor David A. Johnson said. “We even had one stolen, torched and thrown over the side of a wash (drainage canal).”
There have been no successful break-ins or thefts of cars in the past three years, Johnson added. Someone smashed a limousine window with a rock several months ago but ran when the alarm sounded. The company now keeps each newly purchased limousine in a locked garage until an alarm system can be installed.
The rising frequency of car crimes has spawned an industry that produces everything from $4,200 car alarm systems to $3 pairs of round-topped replacement plastic door latch knobs decorated with Playboy bunnies.
Many area residents buy security devices after becoming the victims of crimes. “They’ve broken my windows, and another time they stole my back wheels,” said Juan J. Guttierez, a Los Angeles electrician who went shopping recently for an ignition lock. “It doesn’t matter to me the cost; what’s important is achieving the greatest security.”
“I don’t want them to rob me again,” said Alfonso Aquino, also of Los Angeles. Joy riders briefly took the construction worker’s 1982 Ford LTD, so he set out in search of a steering wheel lock upon buying a 1981 Datsun B210 recently.
But while steering and ignition locks and even the sirens for alarms are largely produced in Taiwan now, the sensors, computerized control modules and final assembly of car alarms remain a very American industry--and industry experts feel that it is likely to remain so. East Asia’s strength lies in the cheap mass production of already-developed technologies, they argue. Car alarms may be peculiarly unsuited for large factory runs because thieves can quickly master the techniques for disabling familiar systems.
Cheap remote control transmitters, which can be programmed with one of just 250 possible codes to deactivate an alarm system, are readily thwarted by increasingly common AM scanners. The scanners test 250 or more codes a minute and are made for car wash owners and car alarm dealers so that they can enter vehicles with the alarms left on. Now the scanners, which also can be made at home with a transmitter and $25 worth of commonly sold electrical equipment, are falling into the hands of thieves, said Barnet C. Fagel, president of Barnet’s Mister Alarm in Canoga Park.
“Alarms are something secret, not something you mass produce so everybody can know how to defeat it,” said Howard L. Miller, president of Simi Valley-based Crime-stopper Security Products.
The makers and installers of so-called “after-market” alarms--those bought after the car leaves the dealer’s showroom--profess little concern at the car alarms now installed in as many as one in 12 new cars. “When you mass-produce products, you can beat them en masse ,” Fagel said.
General Motors offers alarms as an option on nine of its more expensive car models and installs them on all Corvettes and Allantes but has met resistance from dealers in making alarms standard equipment, said Bernard J. Riley, GM’s vehicle security coordinator. Many dealers already sell and install after-market alarms and make big profits doing so.
Range of Ability
California’s car alarm makers still face several problems. Expensive car security systems require considerable drilling and wiring, but dealers with skilled mechanics are in short supply. Botched jobs usually consist of putting sensors on hair-trigger settings so that they detect every little breeze but have included engines shut down by ignition interrupts while the car’s rightful owner is tooling down a highway, said Bill Neill, editor of Installation News.
Starter interrupts, which are more foolproof, are replacing ignition interrupts as a result, he said. “Some of (the mechanics) are really skilled at what they do and some are real hackers--there’s a tremendous range of ability out there.”
Alarm manufacturers also charge Taiwanese makers with sometimes producing illegally overpowered AM remote control transmitters. The beefed-up transmitters will send signals to a car alarm from distances of more than 150 feet but also violate federal regulations and can interfere with landing instruments aboard airliners, Sanders said. “Customs and the (Federal Communications Commission) can’t seem to stay on it.”
And despite the advances, some customers just don’t believe in electronic gadgetry to defend their cars. “An alarm isn’t reliable. . . . (The thief’s) got a minute to get in there and dismantle it,” said Thomas U. Ermes, a Los Angeles resident and assistant hotel bartender who has just bought an $8 steel steering wheel lock for his ’75 Toyota Celica.
