One moment you're cruising to a halt at a red light; the next, being pulled roughly out of your vehicle by an armed man in a mask. It's every driver's nightmare and the crime that helped Grand Theft Auto become a multi-billion dollar franchise: carjacking.
There are endless depictions of carjacking in popular culture, perhaps tied to the role that the automobile occupies in the American psyche. Certain places like Los Angeles, New Jersey or Detroit are notorious for it, with some incidents linked to organized crime rings who will steal to order and arrange international shipments for their discerning (if unscrupulous) foreign customers.
But the vehicles we drive are changing, as is the way we drive them. As a world of widespread autonomous vehicles moves from the realm of science fiction into near-future possibility, it's important to consider how vehicle crime will change, and how the benefits from the elimination of certain categories of crime linked to vehicles—drunk driving, for example—could be tempered by the growth of other types.
When parked, advances in security have made modern cars far more difficult to steal than used to be the case. But if a thief can stop a car with the driver in it, say by bumping it deliberately with another car, creating a distraction or blocking the road with some kind of physical barrier, immobilizing technology is made irrelevant by having access to the ignition keys and an unlocked vehicle.
Read more on Motherboard
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