Some Good News (For a Change)

January 14th, 2007 by Potato

The police called last night around 1 am, and of course it was the first time in a year when everyone was in bed early so no one answered. We just called back and they had a bit of good news for us: the GPS locator in my dad’s car worked and it has now been recovered! Unfortunately, the police computer system is currently down, so they can’t give us any details (arg!). We don’t know if the car’s been damaged, we don’t know if they recovered the other two along with it or not, we don’t know if this lead to a big bust with someone in the driver’s seat or a big warehouse full of stolen cars, or if the display said “tracking active” and they dumped it seperately. Actually, I think I’d like to make a hack for those multifunction displays in cars that comes up after say 5-10 minutes of driving with “recovery tracking active” just to see if it would foil some thieves…

At any rate, the police still have to do their forensics on the car, and then we’ll be able to pick it up later tonight or tomorrow morning. It’s a big relief for my dad, who wasn’t able to find the details of the insurance policy for that car, as it means he won’t have to worry about whether he was covered for the replacement cost, or just the depreciated value of it. My mom’s car we know is covered for full replacement (and even if not, it’s less than a year old so there’s been less depreciation).

Update: Just a bit more information: we know now that the car was recovered in 33 division and will be moved to 32 division for forensics (so it didn’t get too far away…)

Update 2: Well, there are fingerprints on the windows which we don’t think are ours, so the cops have taken those, and aside from the cash my dad keeps in his car, nothing seems to be missing. There is some damage to the centre console (likely trying to tear out the GPS), but we haven’t seen it yet. It has been confirmed that the Mercedes GPS tracking helped find it (dumped in a neighbourhood near Cummer & Bayview), so as much hassle as they gave us to start the track, it did actually work! They are at least partially forgiven for that…

And no sign of the other two cars :(

2 Responses to “Some Good News (For a Change)”

  1. Ben Says:

    Just a question, if your mom’s SUV was so new why didn’t it have the GPS tracker too? Isn’t it stardard on higher end vehicles like that or is it an expensive additional option?

  2. Potato Says:

    My mom’s car is only semi-ridiculously-expensive. You know, you can go to a Mercedes dealer and they might just have one on the lot, sitting around. So for that car it’s an expensive option, but I think it might be standard on my dad’s car (and even if it’s not, the percentage difference is smaller on that one).