Thievery

Last Thursday, I awoke to find that someone had gotten into my carport and made off with some small items like my wife's bicycle helmet and my riding gloves, and they'd also stripped the lights from both our bicycles. Needless to say, I was Not Amused at a level that even Queen Victoria would have considered impressive.

Seeing as this is a family newspaper, I will not directly outline the invective that issued forth from me upon discovering that I had been burgled, but suffice it to say that the air turned blue, a passing flock of seagulls dropped out of the air, stone dead, and God's stern and bearded face peered out from behind a cloud and boomed, “Knock It Off.”

Of course, bleeding hearts might say that no-one sets out to steal unless motivated by personal misfortune, and perhaps the thief or thieves really needed the few small items they took and that we should all be thankful that we have our health and the love of our friends and blah blah blah. Well, to them I offer the pithy retort, “Get stuffed,” and without wishing to have anyone think that I am less forgiving a person than, say, Mother Theresa or perhaps Elin Nordegren, may the miscreant who stole my stuff win a free trip to Sea World where they might fall in a tank and be eaten by Tillikum the killer Killer whale.

But such is life. You work hard, buy stuff, and then other people try to take your stuff away. Sometimes, this is called “government”. The rest of the time, it's just plain thievery.

Here in the Lower Mainland, the rate of automotive theft is the highest in Canada. Sure, there's the bait-car program, and sure, it's a great balm if you've just had your car broken into to log on to the website and see a few luckless buffoons get nabbed by the fuzz. But there's nothing that quite takes away that sick feeling when you come out in the morning to find a broken window, or a jimmied lock, or worse still, no car at all.

Don't expect things to improve either. The widespread use of immobilizer keys has resulted in fewer vehicle thefts, but while there's a great deal of technology put into keeping our cars parked where we leave them, there's just as much tech being developed to steal them.

Take the recently released Electronic Key Impressioner, for instance. This screwdriver-sized device can be inserted in any key-lock and instantly takes a 3D snapshot of the tumblers. It then sends the information via USB cable to an instant key-cutter so a replica key can be created. It's even capable of scanning a database and duplicating the digital signal that passive immobilizers use.

So, whether it's a fancy electronic scanner, or the universal key of A Large Rock, how can we best protect ourselves against thieves?

Well, the first thing to do is the simplest: don't leave valuables in plain sight in your car. Keeping an ashtray full of loonies in your car is the equivalent of rolling in bacon grease and then going for a run in Lynn Canyon, just when the black bears are coming out of hibernation.

Were not just talking money either. It's a pretty lousy idea to keep shopping bags of any description hanging about in the back of your car, and there're all sorts of apocryphal reports of thieves breaking in to cars to steal chocolate bars left in plain view. I wouldn't do it for a Klondike Bar, but somebody might.

But perhaps you think you've removed all the valuables from your car, and you can't imagine what there is in there that a thief might be interested in. Well think again; there's you. Specifically, your identity. Most people chuck the original registration papers for their car in the glovebox and forget about them, but those documents can potentially expose you to identity theft should they fall into the wrong hands.

It's a growing problem, so how do you protect yourself? One possibility is to carry a photocopy of your registration papers with the address blanked out. Should you get nicked for speeding or similar (and I'm sure none of my readership has ever strayed over the legal limit), you're usually given the option to produce the originals within a few days.

At this point, you're probably thinking: “What about an alarm system to protect both my car and the parking meter fund?” Certainly if you own an older car without a passive immobilizer, or factory alarm, it can be a good idea to have some sort of theft deterrence installed. There are multiple types available, the simplest being a shock-detecting alarm that will invariably get set off by a passing friendly cat, and cause your neighbours to despise you. Also, cheap alarms can usually be defeated by a professional thief in the time it takes to read this sentence.

Better yet would be to spring for a two-way pager alarm, which will send you a quick buzz when your car's being broken into. It's only a matter of time before this technology is integrated into the iPhone, so you might soon be sitting through Avatar 2's four hours of eyestrain only to receive a text letting you know your hybrid is being violated, and then you can rush outside and administer justice, West-Coast-style (I'm not sure what that would be exactly. Whack the culprit with a sockeye salmon and then appoint them their own social worker or something).

The bottom line is this: auto-related theft is just part of living in the Lower Mainland, and there's very little you can do to stop it; you can just minimize the risk by making your car less attractive to thieves, but if they want to get in, they're going to get in.

Consider this though, in Johannesburg, South Africa the problem is not so much theft as it is the much more dangerous issue of car-jacking. At the peak of the difficulties, as many as 16,000 car-jackings were occurring every year. Drivers were equipping their vehicles with illegal-but-quietly-condoned anti-carjacking devices like the Blaster, which shot blasts of flame out the side of the car, or a spring-loaded metal bar which sprang out and shattered the ankles of a would-be hijacker.

While it might be satisfying to think of having an anti-theft device that will barbeque the next guy who tries to steal your mp3 player, these medieval-seeming anti-hijacking measures did little to solve the problem.

Aside from taking a few preventative steps to minimize our risk, the fact is, we on the West Coast have to accept that automotive-related theft is going to occur at some point during our car-owning lives, and just be ready to deal with it. After all, blessed are the meek and so forth.

Having said that, if I ever get my hands on the guy who took my stuff, I'm going to put my foot so far up his backside that he'll be using Kiwi shoe polish for toothpaste.

Australia The Hoonish

Well, we did it. Twenty-six medals, fourteen of them gold, thumped the U.S. in both the final hockey games, and (therefore) managed not to have any unsightly rioting. So what now, post-Olympic hysterics? Back to the daily grind, I suppose.

But, as Vancouverites, let's take a moment to salute our partners, the people of Whistler. And by that, of course, I mean the Australians.

It's true, you know. Try ordering a burger or trying on a toque in Whistler, and see how long it is before somebody with an Australian accent wanders over and inquires if they might be of assistance. I managed to get up there last weekend, and every single server, bartender, store clerk, or barista was from down-undah (with the exception of a ferocious gorgon of a Frenchwoman who chased us out of her store for daring to look at wares displayed therein).

Australians are a lot like Canadians in many ways, although they suspiciously always seem to be having a great deal more fun. Having been to Australia, I can understand why. I've got a special place in my heart for the people, with their flavoured salt for your fish-and-chips, their winding white-metalled roads, and their excellent wineries, staffed entirely by cheerful middle-aged women who, despite protestations that you are only a poor student and are certainly not going to be buying a hundred-dollar bottle of Chateau Cuivre Réserve Nuit San Wogga-Wogga or whatever it is, will pour you brimming glass after brimming glass with the instruction, “Now, get stuck into that.”

Currently, the wife is watching an Austalian television show called McLeod's Daughters, a programme of such overwrought melodrama, it makes Grey's Anatomy look like Waiting For Godot. Everybody on it is spouting off about brumbies and jumbucks, pronouncing the word “No” like “Naiue”, getting into tangled relationships generally involving fighting over horses and sheep, and tearing off in a cloud of dust in their modern El Caminos.

Which brings me in a meandering way around to my point. This is loosely a car column after all, and having spent last time chatting about the uniqueness of the Canadian motorist, let's contrast our tight-fisted appreciation for the cheap and cheerful with the sunny Australian driver and their mania for whacking great V8s.

I'll put this out at the start: if your only experience of Australian-style driving up to this point has been watching Mad Max, it's not like that at all. For one thing, there are only two or three mutant cannibalistic biker gangs, and they're fairly easily avoided.

Picture instead a winding tarmac road, freshly laid and curving through the gum trees, around a veranda-skirted pub, and off towards the distant ocean. Imagine the sun beating down upon your dashboard, and lizards skittering off the road at your approach. Imagine semi-suicidal wallabies bounding along beside you and then suddenly dashing out in the road, forcing you to shift a foot to the brake pedal everytime you spot one. Imagine seeing, off in the distance, the shaggy form of an emu: a bird the size of a donkey with the intelligence level of a particularly stupid budgerigar.

Now imagine, and this is the really important bit, that every single car that passes you (as you drive on the left, remember) is infinitely cooler than the lame stuff we get here. Enjoying your Camry? Well how about the Australian option: the supercharged TRD Aurion, perhaps the most powerful front-wheel-drive car available. Yes, it's a family sedan, and yes it has the same horsepower as a Nissan 370Z.

Oh, you've got a nice comfortable Ford Fusion, do you? Well in Australia you might have a Falcon. It'd be rear-wheel-drive and available with either an inline-6 turbocharged engine or a big V8, both of which produce around 420hp. The same goes for the offerings from GM, which in Australia are usually Holdens, and you can get all of these as either station wagons, or half-pickups, or with bare frame rails out the back if you're going to bolt on a flatbed and really terrify your sheep as you drive them to market.

Great big engines are all well and good, but what are you supposed to do with them when you're not outrunning the cannibal bikers or turning cute little wallabies into fine red mist? You go racing, and in Australia that's more fun too. I regard F1 racing as being extremely difficult and technical, but it's not very exciting to the casual bystander. NASCAR is just plain terrible unless you're a fan of turning left and marrying your cousin. Australian V8 racing is like the two previous forms of racing had a baby, and then that baby grew up listening to the Rolling Stones on vinyl and watching The Terminator, and rebuilding engines in the bathtub.

It is sheer, unadulterated awesome, with the demandingly wiggly racetracks of F1 combining with the bullish shunting and rubbing of full-contact NASCAR. The Bathurst 1000 is the big one, Australia's Indianapolis 500, and here's a little tidbit to give you an idea of what such events are like: a police “crackdown” has restricted fans to a limit of no more than 24 beers. Per day.

So, if you have a mullet, move to Australia ASAP. But not everything in Oz is so shouty. Yes they produced AC/DC, but also Dame Nellie Melba. Consider Ford's Fiesta EcoNetic. This small but excellent family hatchback (the Fiesta will be available in Canada later this year) makes use of a 1.6L turbodiesel engine with a little less horsepower than a Honda Fit, but gobs more torque. It will handily trump a Prius for fuel economy, getting a combined mileage of about 3.7 L/100kms, 35% better than the more-expensive Toyota.

Australia also has a much better grey-market import system than ours, so it's even cheaper to get a Nissan Skyline GTR or a Mitsubishi Delica 4x4 Diesel, and the steering wheel's on the correct side. Japanese manufacturers often release vehicles in Australia which are essentially the same as the ones available in the Japanese home market. There are far more engine choices available, including diesel versions of just about everything.

I'll leave you with this little anecdote. After driving from Adelaide to Melbourne and kicking four kinds of hell out of our poor rental car (including me backing it into a concrete mailbox), my wife and I flew up to Brisbane, and spent a few days lounging around with the in-laws before getting a little bored and deciding to drive into the rain forest. We headed for a resort called O'Reilly's, and it was lovely and full of parrots and giant ferns and so forth. However, to get there required the traversing of some seriously narrow roads, with hairpin turns and unguarded drops, blind corners and steep hills, and it took us a good few hours to get there.

When we arrived, slightly seasick from all the corners, we all piled out of the car to go for a recuperative stroll. I wandered around the corner and promptly went back in time a century as there was a man in brown coveralls working on his 1912 Rolls Royce. Turns out it was the semi-annual get-together for the Classic Rolls Royce club of Australia, so I chatted to a few of the nice gents – most near the same vintage as their cars - who had all driven their priceless vehicles up that looping road.

One of them turned out to have driven his Silver Ghost all the way from Tasmania, a distance of 2500 kilometers! When I asked him, with a look of disbelief, what possessed him to drive essentially a rare museum piece all up the Eastern Coast of Australia, he grinned, and patted the flank of his car affectionately. “Well,” he said, with that peculiar Tasmanian pronounciation that's quite like a New Zealander's accent, “It's a great country for driving.”

Indeed it is.