...thereby living out the fantasies of millions.
I'll surmise that the cheap alarms are the problem. A friend has good ones in the family fleet and reports about one false alarm a year. At the other extreme, down the block from me is one that falses every Tuesday and Friday morning to warn us of the imminent arrival of the garbage truck, not to mention kids with too much subwoofer or Harley Davidsons with not enough muffler.
Yet Another Person Who Hates Car Alarms 2079On 10 Aug 2005 10:07:23 -0700, "Ad absurdum per aspera" I don't care how expensive it is - there is NO need for an AUDIBLE alarm in this day and age. If someone wants an alarm...
When the things first started getting inexpensive and widely available in the late 80s, one down the street from me gave a self-repeating false alarm all morning one summery Saturday for no apparent reason other than heat. Naturally the owners were gone for the weekend. When we finally called the cops, it took them about 45 seconds to disable the thing, which made me think the kids who rip off stereos can do it in 30 and professional car thieves never trip the thing at all.
At least we seldom encounter the talking proximity alarms anymore. A visitor across the street from me had one that said such things as, "Warning! Step away from the car!" in an authoritatian voice. Naturally the neighborhood children homed in on that car like somebody was giving away candy, and we heard its limited though stentorian repertoire all day. The effect on burglars went undemonstrated, though it never said "Stop in the name of the law!" (the one thing that really works on them, you know) so maybe it held something in reserve for actual physical intrusion.
Oh, the other great thing about some alarms is the way you can remove just the superficially obvious parts when trading-in your car, inadvertently leaving an ignition interlock in some obscure place so that the next owner is randomly left stranded under circumstances that would baffle NASA. Been there, narrowed it down to that, watched the owner have it dragged back to the dealer so the offending system (which I surmised must be there, but couldn't identify amid all the black boxes in an unfamiliar and fairly complicated Japanese sports car over my lunch break) could be surgically removed.
Thankfully the latest trend seems to be toward purchasing and installing just the blinking LEDs and the stickers, without the annoying and debatably useful alarm parts. --Joe
