Sorry to hear about your car


Hope you can get it sorted with either insurance or the police quickly.

 

http://www.pettracker.com/pet-gps Considering this, cheap and has some great features, like sending you a text if it leaves a certain zone.

 

It's likely that the thief is an owner or was an owner. Armed with an OEM ecu and a matching key and knowledge of where it sits in the car and how to unclip the harness(a la current S2000 owner), the thief can quickly get into the car by undoing the soft top latches without cutting it, folding it back, getting in the car, unclipping the harness from the ECU, quickly plugging in the donor with key, and then jacking the ignition.

A manual kill switch, hidden, that kills the fuel pump and/or main power line, would stop someone from driving your car away.

OP, sorry for your loss. Keep an eye on eBay, Craigslist, and local forms (keep an eye out on WI, IN, and MN Craigslist as well).

A lot of Chicago local parts get posted on CL of other nearby cities.

Good and cheap way to track a car is to get yourself an extra mobile phone with minimal minute plan (one of those $8 additoinal line deals). Get a DC charger for the phone and hardwire it into some power line on the car; set the phone ringer to silent; and hide the phone somewhere in the body work of the car (behind plastic panels, inside the roll hoops, etc.). If/when your car gets stolen, have the phone company track your phone. Even if the thieves disconnect the battery, there'll still be power to the phone from the phone battery.

 

I know of a few ppl that use the cell phone idea, it is great, but what I like about the pet tracker is the text notification. My buddy just got one for his cat and will be testing it out tonight. I asked him to let me know how fast he received the text, it also looks like it traces the route which is another big plus. He will have the cat in his car to mimic the tracker being, well in a car lol. I'll post results as soon as I hear back from him. At $100 for the unit and $8 a month, its an great investment in my book.

 

I agree with urmil's cell phone idea.

 

Very sad to hear. Hope the thief gets found and beaten

 

Yup, Urmil's cell phone idea is probably one of the simplest to implement on a small budget. Perhaps it's obvious, but you'd want to make sure you didn't reveal if you did this yourself, or at least where you installed it.

One additional tip: Try to document all the aftermarket parts you put on your car. If you can properly prove what you have (extensive pictures, receipts, serial numbers, etc.) you might be able to get reimbursed for some, if not all, of those parts' cost.

 

So my buddy tested out his pet tracker and he says it works perfect. It let him know when his cat was away from the safe zone via text and he could locate the tracker using his phone and even gave him closest address and directions on how to get there. Overall he was very impressed. I figure this would be a lot faster than just about any other method, cell or lo jack, no 3rd party to get involved. Just call the police and give them the address. When it comes to car theft, time is a HUGE factor, the sooner you know its gone and the sooner you know where it is, the best chance of getting it back in one piece.

 

Would be nice if we could have a "private" thread for this subject similar to what Mods see vs. members. These sound like great ideas but more info we provide to these people the easier we keep making it for them. We are all in denial if we think they do not come on the boards here and read up. Maybe this should be taken to the FB page assuming that its set to private if you have not been accepted? This way all discussions are kept with in the group.

Sounds like the safest thing to do is sell your car. As great as many of these things are how much can one spend to prevent something that just seems impossible to prevent and at the end of the day I don't know if I would rather have my car thrashed making it bullet proof or stolen and not recovered?

I still think most of these are inside information or prior owners of these cars as Urmil stated. I would suggest others to be cautious as to what meets you go to with your car and the information your sharing about your car. In my experience when I was younger my friends that had their cars stolen or stereo equipment stolen along with other personal stuff walked around and talked up everything they had done to their car showing it off. As exciting as this is to all of us this is the worst thing we can all probably do. I could be completely wrong in my assumptions here but seeing that a few members, Henry & Urmil, have not had issues with their cars and I know they both drive their cars frequent enough to also be at fair risk that these are not just random thief's spotting an S2000 sitting and taking it.

 

Yes. I street parked both my ap1 and my cr for a total of almost 5 years and never had any problems. And the whole time I had my cr, it was street parked in chinatown of all places. I also avoided large meets that had just random people show up. I don't go to merges like jdmc and Friday night lights meets. Too much random people that you cant trust.