I just moved to a new neighborhood and my roommate’s care has already been broken into. I’m curious to know if I should install a kill switch or something of the like (would love to hear other easy anti-theft ideas), or does my truck make the new enough cut of “difficult to hotwire” and I shouldn’t worry? Thanks!
23 year old truck and you are worried about theft? Don’t worry, not even theives want to work that hard to steal something that old.
More likely to broken into so don’t leave anything tempting in the car.
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If it were me I would not bother on a 23 year old truck.
Assuming you mean difficult to hotwire to keep someone from heisting the entire truck? If so, the easiest method would be to split the control wire from the ASD relay and rig up a hidden toggle switch inside the truck.
If you mean theft prevention to keep people from looting the interior then good luck.
A determined thief will take a vehicle and if they can’t they will do so much damage you might wish they had . The best thing to do is not leave anything in the vehicle period .
Even upscale areas have problems with theft so be concerned but making yourself paranoid will serve no purpose.
If the thief really wants the car, he’s got a quick-pick tow truck, and he’s getting it whether he can hotwire it or not.
As a direct answer, yeah, your truck is fairly easy to hotwire. The Dodge trucks didn’t have transponder keys until the early 2000’s as I recall. But I wouldn’t worry too much about an old truck like that.
If you have a bed storage locker I’d be more worried about that.
Trucks from the 1990’s are an easy target for thieves that need a vehicle to commit burglaries, robberies and to get across town to make a drug deal. Locally there were two truck owners shot to death while interrupting a thief stealing their truck, bad people carry guns.
Your truck is easy to steal, I can remove your ignition switch and install my own in less than a minute, start and drive off (hot-wiring is for the movies).
The ignition switch housing is plastic, a thief is going to pull the ignition lock cylinder out of the ignition and use a screw driver to turn the ignition. Before immobilizer systems I used to see a lot of theft recovery repairs.
Remove the panel below the steering column, you will have easy access to the ignition switch wiring to be able to install a kill switch in one of the critical circuits.