When a Car Alarm Just Isn’t Enough : Technology: After thieves made off with her vehicle twice in two months, Misty Beard turned to an electronic sleuth.
Misty Beard knows that her electronic stolen car recovery system won’t necessarily prevent her car from being stolen. But she’s convinced that the system, marketed by an Inglewood-based company called Teletrac, is the best weapon she has against car thieves.
It may also help her keep track of her teen-agers when they want to borrow her car “to go to the library.”
But forget about teen-agers and mythical trips to the library for a moment, and consider the case of Misty Beard. Even in a county in which more than 137,000 cars were stolen last year, hers is an unusual tale of chronic car theft woe.
The first time her car was stolen was last June, when Beard, 41, a resident of the Bixby Knolls neighborhood north of Long Beach, looked out her door one morning and saw that her cherished 1989 Chevrolet Suburban was missing; all that was left where she’d parked it was a pile of shattered glass. It was found in Paramount a week later--minus the hood, the doors, the dashboard, the seats, the steering wheel and other parts totaling about $12,000.
Then, less than two months later, while her Suburban was still being repaired, a guy walked up to Beard at a gas station, stuck a pistol in her face and stole the rental car she was driving--this after she’d already filled it up with gas.
“I was mad as hell,” says Beard, an office manager for a Long Beach surgeon. “Two cars stolen from me in less than two months! I finally got my truck (the Suburban) back from the shop, and it was beautiful, and I decided it wasn’t going to be stolen again.”
Beard went into vehicle protection in a big way. She bought a steering wheel immobilizing device; she had an alarm system installed on the Suburban; and she paid hundreds of dollars for an auto tracking device marketed by PacTel Teletrac.
“My friends said it was overkill,” Beard said. “But I didn’t care.”
Then one night last month Beard was sitting at home when a man from the Teletrac control center on La Cienega Boulevard in Inglewood called and said he was getting an indication on his computer screen that her Suburban was being stolen. Sure enough, Beard says, when she looked out the door, “The damn thing was gone again!”
This time, however, things turned out differently. The Teletrac control center tracked the hot Suburban as the thief or thieves drove it away and then parked it--in Paramount again. Although the thief got away, the vehicle was quickly recovered with only minor damage--a smashed window and a cracked steering column. Relatively speaking, it was a happy ending, according to Beard.
“I just love this thing!” Beard says of her stolen car recovery system.
Ronald May, a Teletrac executive, agrees. Although like most people in high-tech fields he can spout volumes of techno-jargon touting the glories of the Teletrac system, in layman’s terms he puts it this way: “We think it’s pretty cool.”
The Teletrac system works like this: A car owner buys a transmitting unit for about $400 at a consumer electronics store or auto supply house. The unit is then hidden somewhere inside the car--inside a door panel, for example--and wired into the car’s electrical system. The car owner contracts with Teletrac for 24-hour monitoring, similar to that for a home burglar alarm system, at a cost of about $15 a month.
If the vehicle is hot-wired, or if the driver fails to disarm the system after starting the car, the hidden transmitter starts sending out a signal--the electronic equivalent of “Help! I’m being stolen!” This signal is picked up by a network of receiving antennas scattered throughout the Los Angeles area and relayed to the Teletrac control center in Inglewood.
Teletrac then contacts the vehicle owner to confirm that the car has been stolen. Meanwhile, through the process of multiple triangulation, which uses the direction of the car transmitter’s signal to determine its position, the exact location of the car is shown on a computerized map at the control center. The computer shows what street and block the car is on, the direction it’s going in, and even about how fast it’s moving.
“We have a claimed accuracy of 100 feet,” says May, meaning the car is within 100 feet of where the computer indicates that it is. “But it’s actually closer to 30 or 40 feet.”
Teletrac won’t say how many cars in the Los Angeles area are equipped with its tracking system. But May acknowledges that Teletrac does not have as many units in operation as its primary competitor, a company called LoJack, which has an estimated 33,000 customers in the area.
The LoJack system uses a transmitter that costs about $600 and is hidden somewhere in the car, where it remains dormant until the car is reported stolen. The transmitter is then activated by remote control, causing it to send out a homing signal that can be picked up by police cars equipped with LoJack receiving units.
The LoJack system won’t pinpoint the exact location of the stolen car on a computer map, but by gauging the direction and strength of the homing signal, the police can easily find the car. About 475 police cars in Los Angeles County are equipped with LoJack receiving units, which were donated by the company.
Experts say one disadvantage of the LoJack system is that it isn’t activated until the owner reports the car stolen, which may be hours or even days after it’s swiped; an advantage of the LoJack system is that there is no monthly monitoring fee, as there is with Teletrac.
According to LAPD Sgt. Paul Durnell, Teletrac and LoJack are “very comparable” in terms of their stolen car recovery rates over the past two years. About 94% of stolen cars equipped with LoJack’s system were recovered, Durnell said, while 92% of Teletrac-equipped cars were recovered. Durnell said that for both companies, in about three-fourths of the cases the recovery of the stolen car was directly attributable to the electronic tracking system.
Durnell said there aren’t enough cars equipped with tracking systems to have had a significant impact on car theft in Los Angeles. But the potential is there.
“If every vehicle was equipped with some sort of theft recovery system, that would definitely have an impact,” Durnell says.
Although Teletrac is being marketed primarily as a stolen vehicle recovery system, it also is being used by companies that want to keep track of fleets of vehicles--taxi companies, for example. The company is also starting a roadside assistance program in which the transmitter will summon assistance if your car breaks down on the road.
Law enforcement agencies also have used Teletrac for surveillance purposes. Two years ago, Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies obtained a warrant to secretly place a Teletrac unit on the car of a paroled child molester to determine whether he was driving near South Bay schoolyards. He was, and was subsequently arrested.
But there are still other, more personal uses for the Teletrac system. Which brings us back to teen-agers and trips to the library.
Say that you have a Teletrac unit in the family car, and one night your spouse is late getting home from work, causing you to be worried, or suspicious. Up to four times each month, you can call Teletrac, give them your code number and ask them where your car is.
Officials there will activate the transmitting unit by remote control and be able to tell you if your car is where it’s supposed to be, or in the parking lot at a Holiday Inn.
You can do the same thing if your teen-ager asks to borrow the car for a trip to the library. At no extra charge, Teletrac will tell you if the car is at the library or cruising at a low rate of speed on the Sunset Strip.
“I’ve told my kids that I can do this,” Beard says of the Teletrac vehicle locating service. “I’m not sure if I’ll need to do it, but knowing that I can will keep them honest.”
