AirTags only go so far: A new partnership is filling Canada’s car theft gap

In Canada’s car theft crisis, drivers are increasingly relying on tracking devices like Apple AirTags to keep tabs on their vehicles — and if they’re stolen — try to hunt them down.

But law enforcement officials and port authorities warn the technology has its limitations.

An AirTag may show a stolen car’s general location but won’t pinpoint exactly where it’s hidden, which is particularly challenging if it winds up at a Canadian port.

“There are thousands of containers, so it’s very difficult to identify,” said David D’Amboise, the chief operations officer at the Port of Montreal, Canada’s main destinations for swiped cars.

“The Air Tag, it is not precise enough to give us a clear indication where the container is located.”

Port authorities are partnering up with Montreal-based business Tag Tracking to try to narrow down the search and stop these cars from making their way overseas.

“You can’t open 100 containers to find one container. It’s time consuming,” said Tag Tracking vice-president Freddy Marcantonio in an interview with Global News.

The company is installing receivers across the Port of Montreal to “locate, more precisely and more rapidly, a suspicious container.”

He said his tracking system is more precise than the competition and harder to exploit; five to seven devices are hidden inside a vehicle, so it’s unlikely that thieves will find them all.

“We only need one unit to track the vehicle and pinpoint in which container it is,” Marcantonio said.

Tag Tracking has been in business for nearly 15 years and during that time says it has recovered more than $150 million worth of stolen cars.

Since 2020, the number of vehicles from Quebec and Ontario shipped abroad has spiked “considerably” says Équité Association, a