Any cost effective stolen car location technologies? (GPS/Radio based?)

[RickM]

With the talk of stolen cars and trailers I was curious what the alternatives to Lo-Jack might be. One I've been following for a while is the GPS technology based "Digital Angel". They are marketing for the Senior, Child and pet market but I'm sure it could be applied to stolen cars as well. The original pricing scheme was $150-$300 to purchase and approx $30 per month going forward.

Are there other systems out there? Does Onstar have this capability? A pay once feature would be ideal but not likely.

http://www.digitalangel.net/

[304065]

pagetrack

[Harlan Chinn]

We recently had a very sad incident of murder/robbery, where a neighbor murdered a neighboring husband, wife and attempted murder of their young daughter before stealing their Hummer H2 and other belongings. Law enforcement used the H2's OnStar device to locate the vehicle and subsequently captured the suspect.

[RickM]

Any input from the morning crowd?

[RoninLB]

Lo-Jack may work if the PD doesn't have more important work to do in NYC & metro.. and the crooks sometimes stash the car and wait to see if the PD tracks the car thru Lo-Jack.........Ron

[Jack Olsen]

I'm always frustrated by this. Alarms seem to do everything other than what you want them to do. I don't care about a siren, but I'd like a system that calls/pages me when the car is moved after I've activated the alarm, and I'd like to be able to track its location if someone steals it. Pager technology is so common that restaurants use it, and those children's bracelets allow parents to log on to the internet to see a map with their kid's location at any time. Why doesn't someone put this together for cars?

My suspicion is that car alarm companies don't want the liability for the vigilante-style situations car owners might put themselves in if they sold a system like the one I'm describing above. But it still seems like it would be easy to put together.

[kstar]

Jack:

There are several companies that sell commercial products that allow tracking of mobile assets via GPS. Prices are falling and these companies now are making their money on monthly fees, for the most part.

Once the tracking unit is installed and operative, you just log into the website and view a map with a dot on it that represents your "asset".

Some units have multiple channels, i.e. you might want to shut the "asset" down, lock-in the "driver" or monitor speed and various other telemetry depending on the application. It's not to hard to imagine a life-size remote controlled vehicle!

Perhaps one would send a car remotely to pick up a drunk friend . . . then drive him/her home from your home via remote telepresence.

BR,

Kurt

[RickM]

Well, The technology certainly exists. In fact the Digital Angel (DA) mentions that it can be used on "Fleet" vehicles. I see no difference between that and our 911s.

However, I'm cheap when it comes to exploiting existing technology. There's no way I'm paying 30 bucks a month for something I may never utilize. Although $30 does buy piece of mind.

There is mention of a Cell dependency on the DA(ATT infrastructure). Anyway to rig a cell phone to do this somehow?