Car & Personal Safety

Steering locks, trackers, and the personal alarms and sprays that are actually legal to carry. Practical picks, local-law caveats included.

Start with the law, because this is the one category on the site where the wrong purchase is not merely a waste of money. Pepper spray is legal in many places and restricted or banned in others, sometimes by concentration, sometimes by canister size, sometimes only above a certain age. Kubotans, batons and some folding knives fall under weapons rules that differ between neighbouring jurisdictions. Every review names the constraint we know of and tells you to check your own; nobody here is your lawyer.

On the vehicle side the threat has moved. Cars with keyless entry are mostly taken by relaying the signal from a key sitting on a hallway table, and no alarm sticker prevents that. A signal-blocking pouch costs very little and closes that specific hole. A visible steering lock does something different: it will not stop a determined thief, it makes your car the slower option on the street, and that is usually the whole point.

Trackers are the fallback for when the car has already gone. Battery life and reporting interval decide whether a tracker is still alive at the moment you need it, and a unit reporting every ten seconds will be flat within days.

Personal alarms get judged on volume that is genuinely disorienting, on a trigger that works with cold hands, and on not going off in the bottom of a bag. The expensive ones are not reliably the loudest.