PageStar Says Its Car Theft Deterrent Is Hot

A tiny Santa Ana company captured big attention at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week when it unveiled a new system for tracking stolen cars.

PageStar Inc., a 2-year-old company with just 10 employees, said it will soon begin selling a system that brings a stolen car to a gradual stop, pages the owner and tells the thief that police are tracking the vehicle.

“There’s got to be 40 people standing around our booth right now,” said Steve Lipman, chief executive of PageStar, describing the scene in Las Vegas during a telephone interview.

He said the company has already booked orders for about 80,000 systems from car dealerships and installers around the country. The system, called StarTrak, is expected to be available on new cars before the end of March. Motorola Inc. is providing many of the components of the system, which uses global positioning satellites and pager networks to track cars and thwart thieves.

The car owner activates the system when leaving the vehicle. Minutes after a break-in, a device installed in the trunk of the car sends out a signal picked up by PageStar employees, who page the owner of the car and notify him or her that the car has been stolen. Inside the car, the thief hears a recorded warning telling him to pull over, that the car is running out of gas, and that police have been notified. The car is tracked through global positioning satellites and is brought to a gradual stop by a device that turns the car on and off repeatedly.

The system costs between $600 and $1,000 to install, plus a monthly fee of about $12. “Our biggest customers will be people buying Hondas, Acuras, sport utility vehicles--the cars that are stolen the most,” Lipman said.

LoJack Corp., a Massachusetts-based company, is the leading seller of car tracking systems. The company had sales of $53 million for the fiscal year that ended in February 1996, and revenue of $46 million through the first three quarters of its current fiscal year.

Lipman said that unlike LoJack’s system, PageStar’s product goes beyond simply tracking stolen vehicles by paging the owner of the car and bringing the car to a stop. But LoJack is also developing a system that would notify car owners when their vehicles are stolen, said company President Joe Abely, who added that his company’s system is cheaper than PageStar’s. LoJack systems have a one-time fee of about $595.

Abely declined to comment on PageStar, except to say that LoJack has seen numerous rivals crop up in recent years, many of which subsequently faded from the market. “A lot of products are designed to do a lot of things,” Abely said.

Greg Miller covers high technology for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at [email protected]