2014 Kia Forte EX Long-Term Road Test

Edmunds.com

2014 Kia Forte EX Long-Term Road Test

The audible car alarm is old technology that gets completely ignored and adds to noise pollution. It's standard in most new cars like the 2014 Kia Forte, but is it time for newer technology?

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gslippy

Well, glad to see the Forte is still in service after a month of silence. i was hoping it hadn't gone the way of the mysterious Dart.

Car alarms are useless, as demonstrated by the high number of cars that are stolen every day.

misterfusion

Good god yes, David -- audible car alarms do infinitely more harm than good, and should be abolished post-haste. On the scale of things that need to be consigned to a particularly vicious circle of hell, I would place them just under leaf blowers, and just above fart-can exhausts.

zman24_

Not all vehicles are broken into for the sake of their being stolen. Often the news reports a rash of smash and grab incidents, usually at night in a residential setting, where the thief rifles the glove box, console, etc. Perhaps an alternate solution is to have a switch whereby the owner could activate a sound alarm when the vehicle is parked in such a setting, otherwise the alarm defaults to a silent immobilizer.

ruckusrider

The best option is a silent immobilizer and an audible/vibrating(user preference) alarm on the owners smartphone.

dg0472

Most vehicles that are stolen even these days aren't stolen for the purpose of being driven; the objective is to get them in position so they can be towed to a chop shop to be cut up for parts. So the alarm here is for two purposes: sound when someone tries to get in to get valuables out and to sound when someone tries to get in to do something to make the vehicle easier to tow. An immobilizer won't help in either case. But a blaring horn at least makes someone trying to do either nervous by possibly attracting attention. I've found that if nothing else people are curious as to who was stupid enough to set the thing off. You do have give H-K credit for using a moped-like horn for the alarm so at least it doesn't bother people well out of sight range of the horn unlike using the regular horn. On the minus side, it makes it much harder to use the answer-back to find your car in a noisy lot.