The present invention generally relates to vehicles and, more particularly relates to a system for enabling locating and tracking movements of vehicles, for example, stolen vehicles or fleets of vehicles or any moving object.
Vehicle thefts have reached plague proportions in the United States. Aside from the inconvenience of having lost ones mode of transportation, the cost to the economy in the form of insurance expenses, law enforcement activities and other incidental payments, is enormous. Stolen vehicles are often transported or driven to remote locations where they are stripped of their parts. However, a sizeable portion of stolen vehicles continues to remain in use and valuable police department resources must be continuously allocated in finding these vehicles.
Therefore, the advantages and benefits of systems which enable owners to locate their stolen vehicles is obvious. LOJACK.TM. is a known, prior art system for locating vehicles, which relies on equipping vehicles with transmitters which emit characteristic tones to enable law enforcement agents to track and thus locate the stolen vehicles. With LOJACK.TM., the vehicle owner must report the theft to the company that operates the LOJACK.TM. system as well as to the police. It is a complex system. Several steps need to be taken prior to the actual search, including contacting the Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain the vehicle's identification number. Therefore, a considerable delay ensues from the discovery of the theft to the commencement of tracking by police or the agencies. Moreover, the use of the LOJACK.TM. system is further hampered by the fact that the system is presently operable in only a small number of States, and only in major metropolitan regions. Also, each tracking station can only monitor over a 12 to 20 square mile region, and therefore vehicles that have been transported out of range cannot be tracked.
Other existing devices or systems for preventing or thwarting vehicle theft have similarly not been fully satisfactory. For example, conventional systems comprising hood, door and trunk locks and/or motion detectors designed to trigger sirens have saturated the public to the point where they are often ignored. These known systems are also easily defeated. The tide of ever increasing car theft has not been satisfactorily checked to date.
The general aim of the present invention is to provide an enhanced system for locating vehicles and/or for monitoring the movements of vehicles, in a manner that overcomes many of the drawbacks of the prior art.