Car-jacking that ended in hours

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bwilson4web

Well-known member
Joined
Apr 30, 2016
Messages
805
Location
Huntsville, AL
I read about a car hijacking that the owner left his cell phone in the car. It ended in hours so for $6/year:
followmee_010.jpg


I'm curious if BMW Connect has a similar function?

Bob Wilson
 
There is an option to enable GPS Tracking from the iDrive. This will show the car's location on a map from the connected app. I don't know if it updates the location in realtime, or just when the car is parked. Good news is about the i3, is that most car jackers don't understand EV charging, so they aren't going to be going very far, depending on how much battery was left in your car.
 
The iPhone's Find my iPhone feature works similarly. If an iPhone were left in a stolen car, the owner could track the location of the iPhone and thus, the car. Like the i3's GPS tracking, Find my iPhone costs nothing.
 
I seem to remember BMW talking about theft recovery from the embedded cellular and gps in the car. I'm pretty sure that they can ping the car to determine its location, and, if it's stopped, probably disable it (you wouldn't want to do that while moving!).
 
Since the location tracking doesn't work while the car is moving, adding a secondary tracking system may be something to consider.

If the car was stolen, the thieves would need to be smart enough to steal these cars. They would be able to disconnect the 12 volt battery, which would disable the onboard system. They probably would be loading the car into a container and shipping them overseas to be repurposed in another country. I looked into a GPS type tracker for cars recently, when the neighbors truck was stolen, and they need 2 things, 1) a data plan and 2) a power source.

I thought about playing around with those little tracking cubes (pet trackers) that ping off other phones. and send locations to your phone. These little things can be hidden on the car and if the car gets stolen, it might work. My daughter picked up some of the tracking tags a while ago and I was thinking about trying that out to see if it made sense. We aren't too concerned about the i3 due to the challenges of starting it but our other ICE cars and our trailer could be taken if someone really wanted to.

Can you image an i3 in a chop shop! Imagining the thieves playing around with the "large orange wires" makes for a segment in the Darwin awards.
 
The car certainly knows where it is while you're driving it. I'd expect that BMW can access that information in an emergency situation.

The car and server response times seems to vary from a few seconds to a minute or more on my vehicle when trying to play with the app.
 
PBNB said:
Since the location tracking doesn't work while the car is moving, adding a secondary tracking system may be something to consider.
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I am curious , why - LTE/GPRS connection doesn't work while the car is moving ) i belive i read in manual) ?
Perhaps only live traffic updates work, and nothing else ?
I cannot think of any reason why ? ( other than to reduce data transfer cost )
But then , there could be better ways
 
EVMan said:
I am curious , why - LTE/GPRS connection doesn't work while the car is moving ) i belive i read in manual) ?
I know that in early i3's, the data connection is 3G, not LTE. Maybe that's changed in later models.

EVMan said:
I cannot think of any reason why ? ( other than to reduce data transfer cost )
Maybe to protect the driver's privacy. Transmitting the GPS coordinates of a moving i3 over an insecure data connection might be a negative for many i3 drivers.

I'm guessing that cost reduction is the likely reason.
 
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