Baiting the car thieves

Came across an interesting article that describes a new tactic in combating car vehicle theft. The way it works is they kit out likely cars with an advanced vehicle tracking system. The tracking system includes voice and video recording, GPS logging and the ability to contact the police when the vehicle is being stolen. The interesting thing is the 100% conviction rate, as a result of the voice and video recording equipment in the vehicle.

Could this be the next-generation vehicle tracking system? I mean if you take the existing Satellite/GSM based tracking systems available today and augment it with GPS and recording capabilities this could go a long way to getting car thieves off the street.

Take this a step further, embed the camera into the dashboard and when the doors open start recording for 60sec. Then connect via a 3G link to the tracking company and upload the footage. This can be vital in identifying hijackers.

The GPS data could also be transmitted periodically. If the car goes out of cellular coverage, the data recovered when the car is found, would be extremely valuable to the authorities.

Here is the original story