Can a Prius be stolen?

Be sure to tell your insurance company that you deliberately left your car unlocked. I don't want *my* rates to go up :_>

 

Here's a thread that should answer most of your questions; scroll down a bit to my posting.

The gist of it is, to steal an '04 Prius, you pretty much need a flatbed truck; and even then, you're not going to be able to drive it anywhere without (a) stealing the key as well or (B) replacing the ECU (engine computer). The engine immobilizer takes care of that.

 

Crooks don't steal them to drive, they steal them for parts. My Prius suffered a rock through the driver's window one day recently - My initial thought was that someone intended to steal it or some of the electronics inside - later I concluded that it was most likely vandalism but to this day I really don't know for sure - maybe they broke in and determined that they would not be able to jack it with their limited skills.

 

why cars are stolen

I think cars get stolen for three reasons:
1. There is a market for the car, intact, i.e., the SUV's that get stolen and shipped to Belize, Mexico, and other parts of Central and South America, as well as to places in North America, and for late model Camrys, Accords, Civics, etc.
2. There is a parts market, i.e. late 90's Accords and Camrys, for popular and wide spread cars. Cars in this category usually get dismembered within hours of being stolen, so LoJack and other devices are probably useless.
3. Some teenybopper wants to take a joy ride. In this category, you'd have Miatas, Corvettes, Civic coupes, and any "hot" or interesting car.

The Prius in terms of the three categories:

1. The Prius is pretty rare, still, and many people don't even know what it is or how it works. Not likely that there is a huge foreign market for the car in places where stolen SUV's are in demand. Possible, but not likely.
2. Rarity again helps out. There simply aren't enough Prii out there to create a stolen parts market. The car is probably worth more intact than as a parts farm. Even with high demand and waiting lists, I don't imagine Prii being stolen (yet) and shipped to waiting buyers via some auto theft ring. Others on the chatline may disagree with my assessment.
3. A lot of people probably would want to take a ride in a Prius,but very few would try to steal one to do so. Again, most people don't know how they work and the near impossibility of "hot wiring" one, makes it unlikely that the few who would consider theft would be able to pull it off.

I lock my car anyway, as others have said, because I don't want people inside rummaging through my car and taking other items like my deluxe throw pillows.......AND, there's always the probability of some teenybopper thief with a flat bed truck and crane.......

 

In theory, it would be possible for a determined ring of thieves to reverse engineer the key-fob, assuming they got hold of one, and create essentially a 'skeleton key' that cycled through codes until it hit the right one for a given car.

(Geeky example for Trekkies in the audience: Remember Scotty trying to remotely open the Spacedock doors in Star Trek III?)

Presumably, however, Toyota is using a complex enough coding arrangement that such a scheme would take time to 'run' to crack a given car. Most car thieves prefer not to sit around waiting to be discovered at it, so there's a certain amount of security-through-inconvenience going on, as well as security-through-obscurity, since the spec for the key-fob is not published.

There has been a recent report of a Prius stolen one on of the Yahoo! lists; however, in that case, the owner had dropped her key-fob near the car, by accident...

 

Re: why cars are stolen

Actually, we had a group of kids in North Seattle a while ago who would just steal a car, drive it to a pre-arranged place, abandon the car, and then steal another one. :guns: Apparently whether the car was cool or not didn't matter. (A neighbor's Chevy Nova was a victim.)

For some reason, this made me think of Archie and Jughead gone wrong... :mrgreen:

 

Nope... even if they have the key (or a copy) that the fob is based on (and thus, providing the "seed"), the fob uses a rolling encryption algorithm. Each time the fob is used, the code that is transmitted changes between the engine computer and the fob.

Even if they have a RF monitor and capture a transmission between the fob and the Prius' computer, that code won't work when they try it; nor will it do much to help them log on.

So the crooks and their "false fob" are going to be running codes by the Prius' computer for a long time. I.e., past their natural lifespans. (No matter what Sydney Bristow and Marshall may pull off on Alias. :roll: )

Exactly -- that's the one likely situation I see: you lose a working fob, or have it stolen from you. The flatbed truck is the other possibility, but is a lot less likely.

BTW, if anyone's looking for a good primer on encryption and cryptology, let me recommend The Code Book by Simon Singh. An excellent read, and it does a nice job of explaining the situation without getting into the depths of the math.

 

A Prius can be stolen as quickly as any other vehilce. There are tow rigs out there, that reposessors can get, that allow them to very quickly grab the accessable tires, which then automatically locks, and all the perp has to do then is hit the hoist, and the're off with the car. Anything on the market for legal sale regarding hauling automobiles, is also available for the professional thieft to buy, and yes, they do buy this equipment.

People should take the exact same precautions with their Prius, as they would with any other vehicle in a high theft area.

About the only thing I think you can do with the SE/SS system, is thwart a carjacking. You can hit the power button instead of park, which shuts the car off, as you make your quick exit to avoid harm from the carjacker. With the fob safey in your pocket, and presumably out of range very quickly, the perp is stuck with a car that won't go. Since most carjackings seem to occur while the perp is running from the police, the delay should result in the perp getting caught. Hopefully, you would then be able to see the look of disgust on the moron's face when you hop in the car and drive it away. :mrgreen:

 

Do you know this for sure? How? And if this is so, how can there be two (or three) separate fobs for the same car? Hubby parks the car and goes off on his bicycle. Later, Wifey drives the car with her fob, which has had no communication with the car since she last drove it.

I don't believe the rolling-code theory.

 

When the battery in the fob for my Rattler alarm died, I just pulled the other one out of the drawer and used it. The 'rolling' seems to only roll so far from any companion fobs...

 

I don't know for sure. I got the information from 2 places:

• In response to an inquiry on the Yahoo group. It wasn't detailed, but the person said, specifically, that the question had been discussed a few months before, and that they'd got confirmation that a rolling algorithm was used.
• In one of the 70-billion web reviews of the '04 Prius I read during Feb-March, at least one of them mentioned that Toyota used a "rolling code" algorithm for the fob (whether you had SE/SS or not.)
  • 
    However, as we both know, false facts can be recycled and regurgitated through the internet and the press. So I can't say I'm absolutely sure.
    
    
    Now here, I can provide some satisfaction. God bless HowStuffWorks.com and all who sail in it: their article on How Remote Entry Works explains things extremely clearly -- better than I could. (I could feel the buzzwords coming on...)
    
    As to how you can have 4 different fobs with rolling algorithms, quite easily: the car's computer has 4 different locations in memory for the current rolling code to be stored. Each fob has a unique ID that allows the computer to determine which of the 4 locations to check the transmitted code against, as well as which code to run through the pseudo-random number generator again.
    
    [hr:20d44bf03d]
    
    Back in February, when I was first thinking of the Prius, and was curious about whether to order a model with SE/SS, I did a lot of digging about the security of the fob -- more than almost any other aspect of the Prius. (Big Geek / go figure.)
    
    Actually, there's some even cooler things that could be done to insure syncronization of the car and fob's code keys -- partial key encryption, etc. Some incredibly brilliant breakthroughs in encryption science were made back in the late 60s and through the 70s; the ability to send encoded information over the open airwaves, without fear of them being decoded, has never been greater. (Unless someone figures out quantum theory encryption (and decryption) -- Hooooo baby!)
    
    Which is, of course, a two-edge sword, depending on who's using them. But given how I feel about the current administration and the breakdown in civil liberties in this country: I'm pretty pleased.

 

So what happens if you lose one (or all 4?) of your key fobs? Can you go to the dealer for a replacement?

And if so, then couldn't the dealer illegally sell these replacements to crooks (making my movie reference now: Gone in 60 Seconds, where a Mercedes dealer sold some snazzy keys for high-end Benz's).

Bookrats, do you mean RSA encryption? Because based on your link to How Things Work, there shouldn't be any need to encrypt the codes, since its (almost) mathematically impossible to calculate the seed based on a captured transmission.

 

Thank you, bookrats. I retract what I said. Given the explanation in the article, I believe they do use a rolling code. Though the procedure for resynchronization must be different, as we have no key to turn. In any case, I trust Toyota to make sure that it would be agonizingly difficult to start the car without the genuine fob. Losing a fob is a much bigger concern than someone's faking your fob.

 

Yup, RSA encryption. And on consideration, you're right -- there's no real need to use encryption in these cases.

The one advantage I could see to it (other than pure geeky math/engineering fun) is a way to eliminate having to do, resynchronization, ever.

However, this is not worth the extra expense to plug RSA encryption into your Prius and its fobs.

 

Absolutely. I sometimes tend to get so involved in the how-to/engineering of a problem, that I forget to step back and look at the relative priority of it.

It's far, far more likely that you'll lose a fob then encountering someone with the wherewithall to try faking it. (Though it's refreshing to see how difficult that will be to do.)