Well they ARE good for ratings.
I may have found an answer here; I came across this info recently:
"If you are concerned about an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) disabling your vehicle, then buy a diesel or a pre-1975 gasoline-engine vehicle. Some later vehicles can be retrofitted with traditional ignition systems that don’t have microcircuits. (Ask your local car mechanic)…
…Chrysler was the first of the big 3 manufacturers to abandon the traditional “points and condenser” for an electric ignition. That was about 1974. Ford and GM followed with most of their product lines around 1975…By 1976 or 1977, virtually gas engine cars coming out of Detroit had electronic ignitions…
How to Survive the End of the World as we Know It, James Wesley Rawles p. 254
… and don’t forget to wear a tin foil hat.
Actually, a normal car can be rigged to keep an EM pulse from disabling the computer in your engine. All you need to do is place some used coffee grounds in a ziplock plastic bag, press all the air out of the bag, and encase both the bag and the computer in tin foil, with the bag on top of the computer. You can’t use non-ziplock bags because a twist tie might interfere with the coffee grounds’ ability to block EM pulses. New coffee grounds won’t work. They must be used coffee grounds, and for best results, they should still be wet.
Is African coffee better than Latin American coffee? And will my GPS need a wrap also? How much gold bullion have you bought? What’s your favorite MRE? This could be fun.
Kopi Luwak coffee works best, but if you can’t afford it, you can make your own by swallowing some hole coffee beans and retrieving them after they have been flavored with your digestive enzymes. If you make your own Kopi Luwak coffee, any whole bean coffee will do.
Of course good old Maxwell House coffee will work, but if you use home-made Kopi Luwak, it doesn’t take as much.
Hmmm. Think of this, if everyone left the cities for the the rural areas, they wouldn’t be rural areas anymore would they? They would be cities again. Can’t get away from it. Spending a little time in the hinter lands, I can tell you that current cities are better able to deal with feeding and caring for masses of people than rural areas. Plus they tend to be open at night. Ever tried to get a hamberger at 10:00 in rural South Dakota? Plus, ever try to get out of town at rush hour? No need for the government to shut cars off, traffic congestion does that for you. Not very realistic concern IMHO.
Cops put “kill switches” in bait cars to keep thieves from, say, stealing the cars of conspiracy theorists, but those are specially modified without the thieves’ knowledge of course.
If there was something as simple and concise as a little chip that could cut the fuel on all cars manufactured, owners could easily remove it or tamper with it (like with other chips). Bad guys would catch on to this trend immediately and these chips would be rendered useless. Good, upstanding citizens like ourselves wouldn’t notice or feel the need to remove them. Those who should have the chips wouldn’t and those who didn’t need the chips would have them. The whole project would cost (insert insane tax-payer burden here) and be totally pointless.
The government has nowhere near the money, manpower, assets or legal/public permission to even scratch the surface at taking down actual bad guys. We are having trouble even keeping our atrophying police force in uniform (props to those men & women). I don’t think they are going to be playing with us like remote control toy cars.
“I’m curious. If law enforcement called On-Star with the VIN of a car how quickly could they get the car disabled? And could On-Star be tricked by someone posing as law enforcement?”
With normal bureaucracy and idiocy, the car would likely be disabled 3 days after it was dismembered in a chop shop. Have you ever tried to get cops to do anything for you for anything less than shots being fired? At least in my neck of the woods, good luck. And as far as someone posing as law enforcement being able to do it, I’m sure it’s possible to social-engineer almost anyone. Read any of Kevin Mitnick’s books for the scope of what’s possible.
For the person that said Chrysler had electronic ignition first, this may well be, but my first car, a 1974 Cadillac, had it as well, so GM was putting it on cars by 1973 at least when that model year came out. My grandfather’s top of the line 1973 Buick had a points ignition system.