A vehicle is stolen in France every four minutes. An alarming figure that prompts the question: “when will it be my turn?” “. If our cars, increasingly stuffed with electronics, are paradoxically increasingly easy to steal, the French company Coyote (historically known for its radar warning devices) has imagined a solution to facilitate geolocation and recovery: Coyote Secure. Combining GPS and radio tracker with detectives, this solution, now installed in 400,000 vehicles, would be very reliable. 20 Minutes explains how it works.
“Mouse jacking”, the scourge of motorists
“Now, a car can be hacked like a PC, especially with its hands-free key that emits waves,” warns Stéphane Curtelin, marketing and product director at Coyote, “it takes between thirty seconds and a minute and a half.” This is what we call the mouse jacking. If there is a lack of solutions to combat theft (140,400 vehicles were stolen in France last year, a figure increasing by 5%), Coyote offers its own to… recover the vehicles after the fact. And quickly. Its name: Coyote Secure.
The man machine association
The idea here is to combine technology and humans to recover the vehicle reported stolen as quickly as possible. For the technology, Coyote has imagined a small autonomous box (five years of battery life), non-jammable, hidden somewhere in the car. No, it is not its driver who will try to hide this tracker, but an approved installer (there are more than 1,000 in France) who has fourteen possible covers for each car model. Only he knows where the transmitter box is hidden.
For humans, Coyote has its team detectives. Yes, real-life detectives, employees of the company (usually former law enforcement officers). As soon as a stolen vehicle is geolocated using its tracker, a Coyote agent is sent to the scene to confirm its presence and contact the law enforcement, who are the only ones authorized to orchestrate the recovery of the vehicle.
But there is a problem: the signals from the on-board GPS tracker may no longer be identifiable as soon as the vehicle is “buried” (43% of stolen vehicles are, or stored occasionally in underground car parks or boxes). In the area, the investigator then has a specific receiver capable of receiving signals, even weak ones, using radio technology (within a radius of 1 to 5 km). This will allow him to get as close as possible to where the vehicle is located.
91% recovery in forty-eight hours
If Coyote does not say how many detectives it has (their number was reportedly doubled last year), the manufacturer claims 91% of vehicles recovered in forty-eight hours, and 92.7% in five days. “The speed prevents vehicles from being dismantled or going abroad, even if we have already intervened in Germany, Spain and Holland,” explains Stéphane Curtelin of Coyote. Thus, after the first forty-eight hours following the theft of a vehicle, the chances of recovering it would be divided by ten!
But, interesting: by finding certain vehicles equipped with Coyote Secure, it also happens that the manufacturer’s detectives get their hands on real caches of stolen vehicles (sometimes of the same type or brand, such as hybrid SUVs less than 3 years old). , very popular). There would thus be 13% of so-called “incidental” seizures, made in addition to that of a vehicle equipped with the Coyote tracker.
If Coyote does not reveal the number of cars recovered by its sleuths in 2023, the manufacturer nevertheless provides two figures. That of the average price of a car: “36,000 euros”, according to Stéphane Curtelin (35,474 euros, verification carried out). But also a second: “last year, we recovered the equivalent of 43 million euros in vehicle value”. Which could result in around 1,200 cars being found. In the event of a vehicle not recovered, Coyote undertakes to reimburse the subscription paid by its owner. Small consolation.
125,000 more vehicles equipped this year
The Coyote Secure solution, now recommended by many insurers, costs 14.99 euros/month (with two-year commitment), plus 99 euros of installation and commissioning costs, plus 4.99 euros of maintenance costs. delivery. That’s a minimum expenditure of almost 464 euros.
A significant investment, certainly, but which can cause a reduction in your insurance premium, with many insurers preferring to make a commercial gesture in the event of equipment, rather than having to reimburse the owner for the amount of their stolen car. In 2024, Coyote plans to equip 125,000 vehicles with its solution, an increase of 25%. But not motorcycles: the number of possible caches for its tracker is too limited!
Since 2005 on the radar screen
Historically, Coyote, created in 2005, was one of these community tools (like Wikango, Inforads, Alerte GPS, etc.) to report fixed and mobile speed cameras on the roads. Arguing that there was an increase in the number of road deaths, the government had called it a day in 2011, eventually authorizing the reporting of the famous “control zones” by these brands’ small boxes. The end of “anti-flash” solutions fixed to the dashboard of our cars opened the way to “driving assistance tools”. At the time, the French bought a million of them per year (and 2.5 million GPS devices, like those from TomTom)! But that was before Waze and Google Maps…
