Remote locking

I remember the first car my parents had with remote locking - when you locked it, the horn/alarm made one noise, and when you unlocked it it made a slightly different noise. As far as I recall, there was a short period when a lot of cars did that, but that was a decade or so ago, and now we have reached a point where it's widely considered to be annoying and intrusive to have your car honking away every time you lock it. That message does not seem to have reached the US yet - every time someone comes in late or leaves early, you hear the sound of a car horn beeping away to let not just the person who owns the car, but everyone else in the vicinity know that the car is locked and the alarm is set. In a country where honking seems to be used as a substitute for braking, waiting, indicating and almost any other form of activity you can perform in a car, it's also quite off-putting to have every recently locked car honking away as you drive down the street, try to park outside a shop or just fill your car with petrol, and why anyone would need to draw so much attention to the fact they have an alarm is beyond me.

The alarm is another excessively overblown event - when one goes off you get a succession of different but equally annoying alarm sounds which play themselves on rotation until someone shuts it off. I have no idea why it should be deemed necessary that one alarm sound isn't enough, but from what we've heard, a loop of different beeps, whoops and two-tone wails is the absolute minimum required to draw attention to the commission of a crime. They like things loud here, and nothing short of eardrum damage will do.