> At least where I am, most car theft is organized crime shipping them overseas. Gimmicks like airtags will do nothing.

I remember hearing stories as a kid in Slovenia that if your is stolen, you'll never get it back because it gets chopped into pieces within hours – before you even realize it's gone – and the parts make it to Bosnia/Albania/Serbia by next day.

In the early 00's there was even a show on Discovery Channel about chop shops in UK – indie garages that make new cars out of parts. How the parts are sourced was not discussed, they "just show up".

"Chop Shop" was a follow up to the series "Bangla Bangers" [1]. It was more like a variant of Scrapheap Challenge and nothing to do with organized crime around stolen cars in the UK.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangla_Bangers

As I kid in the UK I heard the same stories, is this still a thing? For the last few years I've been living in Lithuania which has a very big used car parts market, but I've never heard of cars being stolen and chopped up.

Usually parts are sourced from crashed cars, which are bought by breakers who often specialise in a specific model, and resold on online marketplaces. They don't present any form of 'verification' so I don't see why it couldn't be used for stolen parts, but it seems that it isn't.

I have heard about people breaking into BMWs and stealing the media console, but as I understand thefts of the whole car or even easily accessible body parts like wheels are very rare.

I don't feel that it is that security has changed much - if it is organized crime then it's no issue to get a car carrier with a crane and lift the car away. Maybe people have just gotten better morals since the 90s?

AirTags will report their last known location. This is very likely to be the point it was driven into a container. If the container wasn't moved or loaded onto a ship yet it could be found. Additionally, while containers do a really good job and of blocking RF, they aren't perfect and they only need to get a little Bluetooth to a phone nearby. So even an iPhone on a crane operator could expose the stolen car's location. It may not be perfect but it could help. I use them on a classic car and on hidden on two trailers I own.

> All that stupidity aside, how are AirTags actually supposed to help, even if we all had an iPhone and were happy to live under apple's benevolent rule? Most cars have a gps tracker now anyway.

Yeah, I figured the main problem was police not wanting to do anything about theft even when you had a GPS location and videos of the people stealing your stuff. I've seen lots of stories about people who knew exactly where their lost phone/laptop/car/whatever is but police were totally uninterested in recovering the items.

Even if your car is gone, it could be a fun consolation to get a tracker ping from a far away, exotic land.