Bane of thieves

>> Boomerang’s new gadget has a nasty
surprise for carjackers

by KRISTIAN GRAVENORENOR

Until 1995 André Boulay was bumming around university as a marketing student when he and three buddies started discussing Montreal’s famous stolen car crisis. This local phenomenon has bandits snatch four cars an hour, with less than half of those ever getting recovered (the nation’s lowest recovery rate). So the gang started puttering around with a car recovery system.
“The existing ones were regional or didn’t work well indoors, so we decided to either make a hybrid product or design a product from scratch,” says Boulay. Two weeks later the Boomerang car recovery system was born, and soon the team paired up with local cell-phone magnate Peter Laschuk. Nowadays, along with a few bucks in their pockets, the gang has a TSE listing and a team of 95 employees beavering away at their Acadie HQ. They’ve also outfitted 70,000 of Quebec’s four-million cars with the little devices that betray the location of a stolen vehicle. This year the company will make their bid for world domination with a premium Boomerang 2, which, at $449 installation and a monitoring fee of $13 a month, ain’t cheap.
But with the newfangled gizmo, the company will know a vehicle has been stolen often before the owner, as any B-2-equipped car that’s displaced without a special transponder will immediately report itself to the company. About one in 20 car thieves who have nabbed vehicles equipped with the traditional Boomerangs have escaped, mostly because the owners waited too long to report their car missing.
With revenues jumping from $5-million last year to $12-million this year—thanks in part to a provincial policy that allows insurance companies to force the product on car owners—the Boomerang is flying higher than the helicopters the company sometimes hire to recover cars stolen in remote locations. “It’s always fun,” says Boulay. “Especially the recovery aspect, where we use technology and investigation. When we bust a chop shop, it’s great.” :