In September 2005, Canada’s federal transport ministry pointed to a grim statistic — stolen-vehicle crashes were killing an average of 27 people a year, with youth offenders behind an outsized share of them — and did something the United States still hasn’t done two decades later: it made engine immobilizers mandatory on every new car sold in the country, effective for the 2007 model year. Transport Canada’s own announcement made the logic plain: roughly 80 percent of new Canadian vehicles already had the technology, and those models were already showing lower theft rates. Making it universal closed an obvious gap. It didn’t require inventing anything.
Two decades later, a father in Glendale, Arizona did what federal regulators never required Hyundai and Kia to do for him: he closed the gap himself. According to Glendale police, two boys — ages 12 and 13 — are accused of stealing at least eight Kias and Hyundais near 67th Avenue and Maryland between July and August, working the exposed ignition column with a stripped wire and a USB cable shaped to fit, according to a Phoenix-area mechanic who examined the method. Officers said the tip that cracked the case open didn’t come from a drone or a license-plate reader. It came from one of the boys’ own fathers.
That’s a good local crime story. It isn’t, on its own, a car story. The car story is why two middle-schoolers could do this at all, and that story is older, bigger, and considerably less flattering to two automakers who have known about it for the better part of a decade.
The vulnerability was a spreadsheet decision, not a design flaw
An electronic immobilizer — a chip in the key that has to talk to the car’s computer before the engine will start — isn’t exotic engineering. By 2015, it was standard equipment on 96 percent of new vehicles sold in the United States, according to Highway Loss Data Institute research. On Hyundai and Kia models built that same year, it was standard on just 26 percent. The companies weren’t behind on the technology. They had simply decided, trim by trim, that a steel key and a turn-to-start ignition were good enough for the affordable end of the lineup — the Accent, the Rio, the Soul, the Elantra, the Sportage, the Forte…