ON RAMP : Fink Cadillac

To sell a product in Southern California, you have to understand the market. We like our secondary colors in Day-Glo. We take our body images and landscaping very seriously. Then there are the really important things.

Consider the case of Teletrac, an Inglewood-based subsidiary of Pac-Tel. Like other companies, Teletrac is marketing an electronic stolen-vehicle recovery system. If a Teletrac client’s car is hot-wired, a hidden transmitter sends signals to a network of antennas that relays them to the Teletrac control center in Inglewood. There, the car appears as a blip on a computerized map.

Teletrac says it can pinpoint a car anywhere in the L.A. metropolitan area, within 40 feet, in less than three seconds. The transmitter costs $400; the service costs $15 a month.

Teletrac’s competitors offer much the same thing. But for a maximum of four times a month, Teletrac will also tell customers exactly where their vehicle is at any hour of the day or night, even if it hasn’t been stolen.

To do that, Teletrac customers call the control center, give their code number and they’ll find out if the car is parked at the office where their spouse is supposedly working late, or if it’s parked miles away, suspiciously near a cheap motel.

Teletrac brochures describe this as a “peace of mind” service for worried spouses or parents whose loved ones are late getting home. But Teletrac’s Ronald May acknowledges that when the service was first described to test marketing groups in L.A., consumers were a bit ambivalent.

“In other cities when we talked about this,” May says, “the reaction was, ‘That’d be great. If my wife was late coming home, I wouldn’t have to worry.’

“But here there was a certain snicker factor. Some people said, ‘Uh oh, the wife will know where I am all the time.’ I guess it has something to do with it being L.A.”