Now, you can call your car, shut down its engine

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

Why do we hate ordinary car alarm systems? Consider this common parking lot story: The driver of a brand new Infinity presses a button on his hand-held remote control. The car responds with a blink of its lights and a short shriek. He then heads toward the office building, enters the elevator and goes up to the 31st floor.

Then, someone unintentionally slaps the car with their hand. No damage is inflicted to the shiny Infinity. There is not even so much as a scratch on the paintwork. However, the slight impact is enough to trigger the car's alarm. Soon, everybody in the area is subjected to a high decibel sound from under the car's hood. And it goes on and on, torturing the ears of the people in the vicinity.

When the driver returns to his car two hours later, he has no idea of what has happened. From the 31st floor, it is highly unlikely that he could hear his car's loud alarm. In other words, there was not much use in him having such an alarm system, as he could not respond to it in a timely manner and check what the problem was.

He might eventually find out that his car alarm had gone off if the car park security guards or other drivers tell him about it. But then it might be too late as, by that time, another car may have accidentally rammed into the Infinity, causing a deep dent in the car's fender. Wouldn't it be better if there had been a way to alert him instantly, regardless of where he was, informing him to immediately check up on his expensive car?

Enter Afiscom's Smart Alarm. Last week at Le Meridien, Jakarta, a group of graduates from the Bandung Institute of Technology demonstrated to IT and automotive journalists a product that they called Smart Alarm. It is actually a GSM cell phone device that has to be added to an ordinary car alarm system. It has a SIM card and a call number like any other GSM cell phone. If a thief breaks into a car that is already equipped with a Smart Alarm, the car's alarm will trigger this device and it will dial the owner's cell phone number. If the line happens to be busy, it will call the next number that is already preprogrammed into the device. It can call three numbers, mobile or landline, in cycles until it gets a response.

When the car's owner receives the call made by Smart Alarm, he just listens to the sound generated by the device. A different condition will use a different sound pattern, so he will know whether someone has broken into his car and is trying to drive it away, or whether he has forgotten to lock it before he left.

If he is on the 31st floor, he may have no time to rush down to the parking area. What he can do is enter a special code, and the car's engine will not start. Or, if the thief has managed to get it started, it will be shut down.

The benefits can be multiple. First, unlike the driver of the Infinity, the car's owner will be notified of the trouble immediately after it starts. Second, we will have fewer incidents of car alarms producing the high-pitched noise for extended periods of time in the parking lot. The annoying noise is made even more unbearable if the car is parked in a closed basement parking area.

Other features: Talking about basement parking, one thing comes to mind: Signal reception is usually poor in enclosed basements. Luckily, the engineers who designed the alarm system have thought of this potential problem. So, when you activate the Smart Alarm as you leave your car, it will produce a succession of short beeps. The number of beeps will tell you how strong the signal is in that area. If you hear only one beep, you know you had better move your car to another area where the network signals are stronger.

As it is basically a GSM cell phone device, it also allows you to communicate with the people inside the car. So, if you told your driver to go to BSD and then, after he leaves, you remember that he should go to the airport to pick up a guest, you can still reach him and give him the instruction via Smart Alarm. Or, if you need an extra SIM card and your car is not going to be used for the day, you can take the SIM card out of the device and snap it into your other cellphone.

In case the call is initiated by you, the car's owner, you will have to enter a PIN before you can do anything to your car remotely. This prevents other people from tampering with your car. Smart Alarm also incorporates a Global Positioning System (GPS) port, and these engineers are still working on the system that will enable the car's owner to know the exact location of the car using a GPS satellite.

Some unanswered questions: The ability to disable the engine of your car remotely would be great. Just think how amusing it would be to see a car thief, who is trying to make a quick getaway from the parking lot, panic when the car's engine suddenly stops running and the alarm goes off!

The problem is, what if the engine stops while he is already on the fast lane of a nearby toll road? If the car has automatic transmission, it may still be able to coast and give him the chance to pull over safely. But if it is a stick-shift, which most cars in Jakarta still are, a rear-end collision or even a pileup may totally damage the car. Therefore, insurance companies may not think that the ability to stop a runaway thief abruptly will qualify for a premium reduction.

There may be a simple solution, though. A device could be added to play back a recorded warning to the thief that the engine is about to be turned off in two minutes, for example, so he had better start to pull over. This, however, is still not included in Afiscom's Smart Alarm package.

More difficult to overcome is probably the fact that sophisticated cars are usually the target of sophisticated car thieves. Those who know that an expensive car is protected by a GSM-based device only need to equip themselves with a GSM signal jamming device, like the one once widely used in Hong Kong. This is a loophole that these young entrepreneurs still have to address.

Today, Afiscom has been training car dealers, auto shops and accessory installers to put the system in cars, but they still have to set up a nationwide network of service centers. In addition to a Smart Alarm for cars, the engineers have also designed a home alarm system that is also based on a GSM cellphone. Equipped with infrared sensors, motion sensors, smoke detectors and magnetic sensors, the alarm system, which they call N&D for "Night & Day", will automatically call any of the three stored numbers if it senses trouble such as a break-in or a fire. Like Smart Alarm, it will keep calling these numbers in turn until it gets a response from any one of them.

The best part of the product launch last week was the fact that the systems are designed by Indonesian engineers, and they are also made locally. This is something that we, Indonesians, can rightly be very proud of.