jumper5836

Interesting read.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/secret-gps-...094648585.html

Christien

I read this a few days ago. What's absolutely idiotic about the whole situation, if I'm not mistaken, is that nobody questioned where the guy bought the car from. We install these types of devices on every single car we lease. We try to remove them when the lease is finished, because they're expensive ($400 a pop in our case) and reusable, but sometimes, for whatever reason, they don't get removed. We've probably got 20 or 30 dormant units sitting on cars that have been repo'd, sold, smucked up in an accident then resold by the insurance company, etc. I'm willing to bet that's exactly what happened to this guy. Hell, it may even be one of our cars!

jumper5836

True but really aren't leasing companies breaking the law by tracking the car. If leasing companies can get away with it now. Next thing is that you'll have to sign away your privacy rights for insurance companies to place gps unit on your car to get an insurance policy.

Christien

No, it's not breaking the law at all, as long as it's disclosed to the lessee, which, at least in our case, it always is. And I'm pretty certain all the others are doing proper disclosure as well.

I'm not sure it would carry over to the insurance industry. In the case of a leased car, the car is basically collateral on a loan, and is usually owned by the leasing company, therefore they've got a direct interest in tracking it, rather than just the potential prevention of some degree of loss by an insurance company.

Ronan

Christien: what is the nature of the GPS information collected on the leased vehicles?..Is it a passive device or does it create reports for the leasing company?. (I have boomerang on some of my cars, and they do call if they see something).

Turbodan

my bet is it is related to the dispute with his former employer. he claims that he can't do heavy lifting...I bet they want to catch him at the gym or something.

Christien

They used to be completely passive unless we instructed the unit otherwise (i.e. automatic tracking), but nowadays they check in once every other day or so. We can activate things like 24-hr tracking, where it will do a locate every 2 hours over a 24 hour period, or setup a geo-fence, where if the car goes in or out we'll get an email notification, or notifications for ignition or low battery. And of course we can disable the starter, so the car won't start.

Without this technology, we'd be out of business, no question.

LastMezger

Why? Didn't leasing companies exist before GPS tracking? Just curious.

jumper5836

These leasing companies are also not telling the end user that they may end up having to replace there battery every 2 years due to it requiring a power source. I know they have their own battery but when this battery has to many recharge cycles and can no longer hold a charge it then lives off the main battery. Which will cause premature wear on it.

Cosmo Kramer

I work in the temp labour business and a few of my workers have less then steller credit but want to get a vehicle. They end up leasing used cars with the GPS tracking device that can shut down the starter. One of them currently has a 2006 Pontiac G6 leasing for $400/mth for 4 years. Nothing like 20K for an 8K car, but that is the price you pay for bad credit!

I think Christian means when they get burned on payments their collateral would just "disappear" without GPS tracking. Without this technology the leasing/financing companies would have to have a higher credit standards in order to finance the vehicle, and consequently would move less vehicles.

Christien

Yeah, that's basically the gist of it. We do subprime only, and would have to charge substantially higher rates (close to 30%) to cover the losses from repos.

We haven't had any problems with batteries getting ruined by them, though I'd the car is parked the unit will run the battery down faster, maybe 10 days until it's too low to start the car.

Shows you how valuable good credit is.