How could a person disable a car? Sorry it's long, but please read all details.?

Question

How could a person disable a car? Sorry it's long, but please read all details.?

Answer 1

Detach a battery cable. Car won't even click when you try to turn the key. Dome light won't come on when you open the door. If you've got someone not very mechanically ept, they may not notice the battery cable detached. Cost to fix? $0. If you'd like to get a little more devious than that, detach the battery cable, wrap some insulating material around the battery terminal, reattach the cable.



Clamp the gas line. Siphon out the gas. Plug the fuel filter. Plug the air filter. Loosen a vacuum hose.



ps: don't forget the old dishonest mechanic diagnosis: " Ah, the framistat is missing/defective. It's a dealer part I won't be able to get till tomorrow."

Answer 2

Take out the distributer.



Pop hood, remove distributer cap, take spinner (distributer) out and put in pocket, replace cap, close hood.



The distributer is a 2" wide piece of plastic and copper. It 'distributes' current to the spark plugs. Every old petrol (gasoline) car has one, and the car wont start without it.

Answer 3

Since most modern cars have hoods that can't be released from outside, I suggest he crawls under the front of the car and identifies the connector on the automatic transmission for the neutral safety switch. He unplugs it and the car will not do anything when the ignition switch is moved to the start position - lights are okay but no click, no sound at all. You can try it yourself by trying to start any car with an automatic transmission while the gearshift selector is in drive - the neutral safety switch is what lets it crank when in park or neutral. The fault can be passed off as a bad security module in the steering column. See Passkey III in the first source because it disables the starter relay, mimicking the neutral safety switch problem. The same source tells what models and years are like that.



If the bad guy is a Chevy enthusiast he would plausibly know about this, even if he is not a mechanic.



EDIT - oops... I missed the part about him having access to the keys so he could get under the hood. Suspicious, though, I think. He has the keys and then the car doesn't start. Anyway, removing the rotor from the distributor is a classic, even overused. Removing the distributor itself will leave a big, obvious hole. To know if a car has a distributor - many recent models do not - look up the target model in the second source. If there is a round object with an arrow showing rotation that is a distributor; if there is a square block that is coil packs (no distributor). For cars with a distributor, Cartalk had a cute trick in one of their puzzlers. In it, a used car dealer disabled all his cars quickly at night in a way that made them seem to be defective. He swapped the coil connection in the center of the cap with any of the cylinder connections around the edge. The car would fire on one cylinder but not on the others. It could be passed off as a bad distributor, which would often be a special order item. I like the neutral safety switch, though.