I think the point of the Kia and Hyundai cases is that customers had some expectation that the locks would actually provide a higher level of security than they actually did. Otherwise why even bother having locks? Saying that "stealing is illegal and we should pushing the thieves not the companies for failing to provide security" completely negates the point of having any security industry.
If you provide a product that is intended to offer a certain level of security you should get punished when your product fails in a spectacular manor.
Weird how the level of protection the Kia and Hyundai locks provide change depending on whether your local law enforcement agencies are effectively able to deter theft?
To some extent, but the TikTok craze was just crashing it, which happened to my parents. The car made it all of 30 ft and they hit a tree. Honestly not sure what local police can do to stop that.
Is an ignition a lock? How about the wiring to the ignition…?
It would be one thing if Kia and Hyundai advertised “anti theft” via an immobilizer then didn’t actually put one in. They just left it out because the company is being cheap. The cars being sold with this vuln are cheap. You get what you pay for.
Models affected by this extend well into the 30k range. This is not just affecting the cheapest possible vehicle someone can buy and we're running into people not setting expectations accordingly. Equally cheap vehicles from other manufacturers are not nearly this easy to steal, particularly by completely inexperienced thieves.
Cheaper than the mean perhaps, but again not bottom of the barrel for many of these models.
However, even if you want to keep focusing on these being 'cheap' vehicles, it STILL stands out in the industry as highly unusual. Even back in 2015, 96% of vehicles from other manufacturers had these devices (https://www.iihs.org/media/0e14ba17-a3c2-4375-8e66-081df9101...). It's a pretty easy argument to make that consumers would not be looking specifically for a feature that is near universal elsewhere. It was an abnormality and Hyundai/Kia will, unsurprisingly, pay for it in the long run.
30k car is definitely not "cheap". That statistics is skewed by 1) high-end cars (Bill Gates walks into a bar, everybody's average income doubles) 2) the fact that people that can't afford expensive cars just buy used ones. That doesn't make the new ones less expensive in any way.
Stating "You get what you pay for" is a strange way to both blame the victims & attempt to absolve multi-billion dollar corporations for not including a standardized piece of security equipment, when you consider that every major manufacturer sells vehicles firmly in the same price bracket - up to half the price of your reported average (we love to forget about outliers, don't we) that have this equipment.
Pedantry about what security was advertised or not will not make a compelling case. What a strange thing to try to argue.
Nobody even knows what an immobilizer is or how it works. They put key in car and go. People don't even read the manuals that come with the car. Most people don't even read signs along the freeways while they're driving.
This kind of willful ignorance about cars goes so far that insurance companies willfully chose to insure these cars against theft, and claimed they had no idea that the cars didn't have immobilizers. And now they are suing the manufacturers. It's the insurance company's job to evaluate risk. All they had to do was read the fucking manual and if it didn't say something in there, ask.
I’m stating the manufacturer did not advertise this security feature, nor did any of the purchasers really care until their cars started getting stolen and used to cause mayhem.
You stated a basic security feature such as an immobilizer should be installed by default because it’s cheap.
Well, then I suppose you could rightfully punish the manufacturers for cars sold in Europe that don't have them. But, you should probably not punish manufacturers for cars sold in the US that don't have them until you make it illegal to sell cars without them in the US...
If you distill it down, it essentially comes down to not doing things that no law explicitly requires (lest you end up with walls and walls of law books simply describing very specific matters), but can be reasonably expected of you to have done.
What’s reasonable depends from time period to time period and the norms that exist, nevertheless the concept exists.
A good example would be you owning a house with a balcony in an unincorporated area where no law exists that sets requirements on structural integrity of such things.
You’re aware that the balcony might be a bit iffy and it has been decades since last it was checked out by a professional.
You have guests over, you don’t bother telling anyone to stay away from the balcony.
Some of your guests walk underneath the balcony, or worse, they go out onto the balcony to have a smoke.
The balcony collapses and your guests get injured or die.
You’re on the hook for negligence. Specifically negligence that resulted in tort in this case.
Hell, in some places, depending on the prosecutors in the area and the laws on the books, you might even be criminally liable for negligent homicide.
My comment on the EU and the regulations there isn’t to imply that the laws there apply to here in the US, rather it’s used (and could be used in real life) as a way to argue that the solution is inexpensive and not implementing it could be considered negligent because there is an easy solution available due to that regulation.
But what we're talking about here is that there are "bad guys" (tm) who stopped by your party and used a chain saw to cut the supports under the balcony, which would not otherwise have fallen down. But you could have prevented this if you had reinforced the supports with steel posts.
The Kias and Hyundais didn't steal themselves. Let's put the blame where it lies, on the f**ing criminals.
Are you really taking the side of the idiots who made a modern car you can Hotwire in 45s with no special tools? And then refused to issue a recall and fix the problem?
