So..... what goes in to stealing a car in 5th edition. 3 different situations, as I imagine they would be different.

a. Old beater in the barrens.
b. New Eurocar Westwind sitting in a parking garage.
c. Max secured shadowrunner Bulldog.

thanks

I imagine in scenario A that the keys are already in the ignition, as its "owner" is banking on the insurance payout.

A) Probably a throwback vehicle or has any sort of tracking system long since disabled/stolen.
Simply a matter of breaking into the car and hotwiring it if it doesn't already have the keys left in it as Draco mentioned above.

B) Nice vehicle and loaded with normal safety features. Not only do you have to pop the locks, but you will have to go through the headaches of messing with ownership of the vehicle or otherwise disabling its system so as to not broadcast to the world it's a hot item.

C) Don't.
C1) Runners shouldn't mess with Runners. And not for any 'Honor Among Thieves' bulldrek.
You are part of a small pool of people and word gets around so jacking a fellow Runner usually comes back to haunt you one way or the other.
And unlike Corps, they don't stop chasing you just because you stepped into someone else's territory or lay low for awhile. Runners tend to hold a grudge, especially if it's gear related.
Unless you are a Jackpointer, then it's Forgive and Forget. Don't ask me why, they just do. See also Dark Resonance for more on this.
C2) Messing with digital ownership is the least of your worries. It will probably be booby trapped with zappers and other treats to maim/disable would be carjackers.
Remember these are professional criminals and can't exactly go crying to their insurance if it gets stolen.
C3) Assuming you can bypass whatever deathtraps it has on it and you pop the door locks, you may well open the door to see the muzzle flash from the barrel of a Predator/flavour of the month weapon pointed at your head cutting short your career in the trade.
See to afford that sweet ride, our rigger probably took Street/Squatter Lifestyle so has been living in his van which you just tried breaking into while he was napping.

I'm a lot more interested in going from looking at the car on the street to making it do what I tell it to, without going to jail, than an explanation of why I should or shouldn't. I know how the world works, but I'm not that up on how 5th ed rules work. And they haven't, or might never, make the book that lays it all out in one place.

What skill check vs what defense does one use to steal a car in Shadowrun 5. Then, what do you need to do to make sure you don't get caught?

Ah, well if you want mechanics.....

Popping the door locks would probably be a Hardware/Lockpicking + Logic to get the door open.
Then another Hardware/Lockpicking + Logic again to start the vehicle.
The GM may assign thresholds depending on make and model, the better models may be tougher than the 2070's version of the Yugo.


Ownership
You can illegally change a device’s owner with a Hardware toolkit and an Extended Hardware + Logic [Mental] (24, 1 hour) test.
A glitch on that test results in the item sending a report to the authorities.
On a critical glitch, reports are sent and to boot you have to basically start over.
Some GM's may have the car go into lockdown mode while screaming alarms.

Now this is the fun part. With a threshold of 24 and 1 hour between tests to build toward that, it means changing ownership is going to take awhile.

If while you are working on changing this over, the real owner notices his car is gone and contacts the authorities, they will probably track it down.
How fast is that and what kind of response can you expect? Depends on who owned the car really and where the locator signal is.

Low end car or its located in the Barrens? Cops will probably tell them to contact their insurance company to have it written off.

Decent vehicle and/or cruising through the nicer parts of Seattle? edit:APBBOLO put out and a car or two sent out to the location where its at.

High end car/owner. Expect a much more prompt response. Use the car and dump it asap. You probably won't have time to change it over.

Course this is just if you are trying to take ownership of the vehicle.
If you are just wanting a Rigger/Decker to hijack a vehicle to use for a short time and dispose of it after, that is a bit different and is it's own ball of yarn.

Mostly Hardware
- Hotwire
- Disable "booby trapped with zappers and other treats to maim/disable"

Throwbacks are going to need Locksmith and Hardware.

Threshold # are in your GM's wheelhouse based on what they think difficulty of given systems are, as per table on pg 45.

When we get to Rigger V, I'm planning on begging to write a chapter on this.

I'd like to be able to click like on this post, but this message is as close as I can get. So....... LIKE!

I would also think that some of the newer cars don't even have manual controls...the owner uses pilot and maneuver program with a map auto soft exclusively.
That way, they don't even need to bother learning to drive.
And if you want to start the car, you are going to need to spoof it so it thinks the owner gave it new coordinates to go to.

One of the things I want to point out, that. More and more, cars are self-driven, with fewer people bothering to learn how to drive every year. What's the point? Let the autopilot do it, or even better, GridGuide ™!

Shadowrunners cling to the freedom of teh road more than others.

For some STRANGE reason.

Direct Hacking Method:
Hacking a car will require placing marks on the car's icon through wireless or direct connection hacking. That involves placing marks using Brute Force (Cybercombat) or Hack on the Fly (Hacking). I don't recommend Brute Force, as it will alert the owner that someone is hacking their car. Next you need to get the door open, which is Control Device (Electronic Warfare) and will require 1 (or 2?) marks. To get the car running you will need to make another Control Device (Electronic Warfare) and then you can probably drive it away. You probably want to make sure the car is in manual drive mode, because to keep from getting spotted by the legitimate owner via the matrix, I recommend getting a jammer going to block the car's connection to the matrix, but also to block all the wireless signal for any tracking or security tags on the car, and all the personal stuff the owner might have left under the seat or the trunk, which they could also track.

Indirect Hacking Method:
Find the owner's persona on the matrix, and hack at least one mark onto it with your preferred method. Now you can use Spoof Command (Hacking) to make the car think the owner is saying to unluck the door, and again to start up in manual drive mode. You will still want to use a jammer to block the car and anything in/on it from the matrix once you get going, especially if the owner noticed you hacking him/her. I'd then recomend restarting your deck in order to clear your Overwatch Score.

Hotwire Method:
Use Locksmith to get the car door unlocked. I assume it's a maglock for most modern cars. If it has a security system, you will also need to use Hardware to keep the alarm from getting set off, and might even need to deal with an anti-tamper trigger too. Once the door is open, you can attempt to hotwire the car, likely using Hardware again. Once the car is started up in manual mode, you should still use a Jammer to keep the car and anything in it from being tracked on the internet.

Technomancer Method:
You can use the Puppeteer power to force a wireless vehicle to unlock the doors and then to start up in manual mode. Resonance Veil could be used to make the Owner think the car is still in it's parking spot as you drive it off. It's a bit of Fading to deal with, but there is no overwatch score to clear.

EDITED TO ADD THIS:
Car Jacker Method:
Wait for the owner to show up at the vehicle, then threaten them at gun point (or manipulate them through magic) into turning over ownership of the vehicle to you using the legal approximate 1 minute method for transferring ownership described in the book. Now you "officially" own the ride, although you may want to be careful about the digital trail of ownership if the victim reports the crime.

Keeping the Car
So far, my thoughts cover getting into the car and driving it off. If you want more than a joy ride, you'll need to adjust the ownership, which there is a debate about. You may or may not be able to do so without connecting it to the matrix. Either way, it requires a long hardware check which is best done before anyone has come looking for the car. Personally, I'd recommend just selling the car to an appropriate contact, and let the professionals handle changing the ownership. If you need to use the vehicle for a while (like for breaking into a facility using a delivery truck) you will probably want to disable the matrix connection on the ride, as that's easier than doing a full ownership change... although it will look a little odd to others on AR that the car isn't online. I'd recommend using the Wrapper program to make some other icon (like an RFID tag) look like the vehicle icon that is expected.

Complications based on target:
The beater car is likely a throwback with no direct matrix connection. To hack the car, you will need to plug a cable into it. While it can't be directly tracked or overridden by the owner via the matrix while you drive off in it, you may still be tracked by any stuff the owner left in the car, so the jammer is still recommended. Manually disabling the door locks will probably be easy and not have special security features.

The Westwind has a pilot rating of 3, but I'd expect it's wealthy owner to have it slaved to another device with a firewall of 6, so it's going to be tougher to hack. Depending on the owner, it might even be part of a Host system... which could be a real mess hacker wise. You might try direct connection hacking to make this easier, but I'd expect finding a port on the outside of the car to be difficult.
Manually opening the doors locks will likely face both an alarm and an anti-tamper device. There might be an anti-tamper device for hotwiring the ignition too.

For the Shadowrunner vehicle... I'd expect the ride to be connected to an RCC, which will likely have a high Firewall. The owner might have replaced the locks on the door with tamper resistent ones, and they may have implanted grenade system (from Coyotes) inside. Messing with the van might also get you attacked by flying gun drone, and or a large cybernetic troll... or an angry spirit... In general, stealing a shadowrunner ride is a bad idea, as shadowrunners are resourceful, violent, and vengeful.

I think the three Vory guy's in John Wick should have listened to Bearclaw's advice.

Ok, let's take the Eurowestwind as an example, but the idea should hold otherwise. I'm assuming the car is somewhere safe to mess with. I'm not assuming the car has been enhanced, but I am suspecting reasonable steps for protection. In particular, I'm assuming the car is slaved to a top of the line commlink for security, which is reasonable for a car of this value. I'm assuming the car's icon is in public mode, because it's owned by a proper citizen that probably lives and works in neighborhoods where having one's car in hidden mode isn't allowed by the corporate-police.

Hacking
Step one is to start applying marks. This is Decker or Technomancer work. If you don't want to be caught, then Hack on the Fly is your smart option. Hacking + Logic [Sleaze] vs Owner's Intuition + Firewall (higher of the car's Pilot 3 or Commlink 6). Success applies marks, failure raises alerts. You're going to need 3 marks to drive the car, but you don't have to do them all at once. After one Mark, you could try to unlock the car doors, but you could also wait till you have the 3 needed to drive it.
To get into the car, you'll need to tell it to unlock the car doors. That's Control Device. Because you aren't the owner of the vehicle, but are using hacked marks, you will need to do this using Electronic Warfare + Intuition [Sleaze] vs Owner's Intuition + Firewall (higher of the car's Pilot 3 or Commlink 6). You can now walk over, open the door, and sit in the car, if you want.
To order the car into operating in manual drive mode, you'll need to make another Control Device roll. Electronic Warfare + Intuition [Sleaze] vs Owner's Intuition + Firewall (higher of the car's Pilot 3 or Commlink 6). Alternatively you could order it to self drive somewhere using it's pilot rating, but any time you give it a new command, you'll have to make a new hacking roll and have enough marks to do so. Because of how Grid Overwatch Scores work, that's going to be a real problem in the long run, so setting it to manual drive mode, and then restarting your persona to wipe your marks/overwatch score is probably a good idea.

At this point you can now drive the car around, but if the owner hops onto the matrix and decided to look at where the car is, it will show him/her it's not where he/she left it. The owner could use their higher authority to issue commands to the car, like lock the cars and drive directly to the police station. To prevent this, you're going to want to get the car off the matrix. As I said in another post, there are probably a lot of things with matrix icons in the car that belong to the owner too, all of which could be used to track the car's location. The fastest way to get those all concealed is to use a jammer. The wireless bonus on the jammer will let you set particular icons as immune to the jammer, so all your own stuff will remain online while the car and all the icons in it (hidden or not) are taken off-line. Combine this with a Wrapper program to make a fake looking car icon, and it shouldn't raise too many eyebrows when you drive down the street. The Jammer should only operate at rating 3. Enough to block common electronics within 5 meters of you, but not so strong it will jam to wide an area at a high enough rating to draw attention. It will only be rating 2 within 10, and rating 1 within 15.

You now have a car in manual drive mode with any electronic tracking options disabled. If the owner of the car notices their ride isn't where they parked it, they won't be able to find it online either, nor any common belongings (including security and stealth tags) they might have had in the car... unless they have something at device rating 4 or higher in the car, and it's operating in hidden mode.

Interesting. So if you use a jammer in every case, that means that you need a way to get the jammer physically onto the car. EDIT: As well as make it impossible to do this remotely, as you need a way to move the car.

Won't that cause every wireless device you drive past to momentarily disconnect?

Won't the owner and possibly law enforcement be notified the instant the car falls off the radar?

My semi-houserule is that the ability to exclude chosen devices from being jammed jamming translates into the ability to exclude all devices except those you want to jam. Of course you need to be aware of the device you want to jam, so there's the risk of hidden stealth RFIDs and other surprises.


If the owner is paranoid enough he could run an agent to keep an eye on the car's icon, but that would generate a lot of false alarms from ordinary matrix Noise. Besides, fast thieves will be gone before anyone can react to an alarm...



Organized thieves would IMO also make sure to get the car off the road as fast as possible, for example by having a garage nearby decked out with Wifi-negating fabric. Maybe even a semi-trailer.

Jammers are fairly small (-2 on the concealment) so carrying one around isn't too hard.

You do bring up the interesting idea of Remote hacking cars for theft. Because you aren't in/at the car, the owner noticing it's driving around without them isn't a terrible thing... but if the owner notices the car is missing, he/she can immediately locate the car and regain control of it very quickly by ordering it to restart (removing all your marks on it.) Plus, the entire time you have illegal marks on the car you are also gaining an overwatch score.

If your objective in stealing the car is to keep it long enough to sell, or otherwise use it, I think you're better off having some one (maybe not you) drive it manually with all the icons knocked off-line. In theory you could hack the car remotely and have a friend (or humanoid drone? Do we have ones without sword hands yet?) drive it off while carrying the jammer. Considering the cost of a Cyberdeck to do the hacking, I imagine car theft rings might work this way, with the decker (or technomancer?) hacking rides for the non-techie members to speed of in towards the chop shop.



Page 441: "You can set your jammer to not interfere with devices and personas you designate."

A cunning car thief will exclude his own gear, and the basic public icons he intend to drive past: specifically those that are involved road monitoring. You'd also be smart to add other cars that get too close, especially cop cars, so as to not draw attention to yourself. Thanks to the 1 rating drop off for every 5 meters from the jammer, most people or things you drive past won't get much more than a 1 (maybe 2) noise penalty, which isn't enough to knock key/obvious devices off-line. You just have to worry about things within 5 meters, where they get the full force of the jammer. Yah, it might be a bit odd to people, but it should be too easy to figure out where the noise is coming from, and it's a lot better than having the car's owner tracking you.

If you know the neighborhood you're in/passing through has noise issues already, you could probably get away with using a lower powered jammer, which will reduce the range of the jammer effect. Hell, with a bad enough neighborhood, you might not need the jammer at all.

Of course if you have the time, you could specifically scan the car and everything in it for icons, and then disable or remove all the icons... but that's more time than you'd probably want to take when boosting a car.


Nothing I've read in the book indicates that you get an alert when one of your possessions goes off-line due to signal loss. The car certainly can't send an alert when it looses it's matrix connection, and unless you have a sprite or agent program (which don't run on commlinks) set to check on your car constantly, nothing should automatically notice the car is off-line. I guess, if the car was slaved to a Host system, and it had Patrol ICE running, it might notice... but that's by no means a standard setup.

That's not to say that the owner isn't somewhat aware of their vehicle (or any icon). Page 236 says "The owner of a device, host, persona, or file can always spot it in the Matrix." Moreover, ownership is like having 4 Marks on an Icon and page 235 on Matrix Perception notes that "You can always keep track of your marks, so you can spot an icon you have a mark on without a test, no matter the distance." Essentially, it looks a lot like the owner of the vehicle can automatically locate it on the matrix without needing to make a test, but they must still take the matrix perception action. In other words, they won't know the car is off-line unless they specifically attempt to interact with it.

As for Law Enforcement: Nothing in my reading indicates that the cops get an alert when something goes off-line. In fact, they don't automatically get an alert when some uses Brute Force to hack a car. The owner gets the alert, and they could probably then call the police, but the cop's aren't contacted on their own. Moreover, cars go offline for various legitimate reason. Mostly for driving through the Noise filled cities (see page. A Downtown area of a city generates 2 noise all on it's own, thanks to all the AR advertising. If someone's having a big sale, or it's special event, you can expect Noise 3 easy.

Very good. Then cars are very easy to steal.

In my world, anti-theft tracking systems notice when cars disappear, notifying the owner at a minimum. Likewise, a bubble of dead signal moving through the city would be a clear beacon to anyone able to monitor it.

The comment about placing the jammer on the car was not about the concealability of the jammer. It limits your MO. Maybe you could remotely pilot a little drone to place the jammer on the car, and selectively allow the remote driving to remain online while jamming all tracking and anti-theft. Then you wouldn't need to have someone at the scene of the crime every time. Just hope that they don't find out and disable the car through that remaining wireless link.

Cue SedanRun 2nd Ed

The good news is in SedanRun™ the Rigger Black Book is the first sourcebook released after core since your runners will want a catalog of vehicles to be lifting and is almost as thick as Core (it's all those glossy pics).

Thanks for the help guys, that's what I needed. I'm playing a combat decker in some missions games, so this works great. There's not a lot of guys playing riggers, and I didn't have the cash to invest in a vehicle, so I was hoping I could boost cars for the runs, and just leave them. I was originally going to have a VCR installed, and add in rigger interface on whatever I stole, but there's no rules for that, and as it's a missions thing, I'll be having different GM's to negotiate with, which didn't sound like a lot of fun. So I decided to just be a decent wheel man. So, I'm not playing a rigger, but I did invest a few points in pilot, and my reaction is good, so manual control is great.

...or have an agent do it for them every x seconds. The agent is its own persona and therefore usually does not have owner privileges, but it can still do the usual Computer + Intuition test. An R3 agent should reliably get the one hit required to spot a known target. Of course, losing "sight" of the car could still be for all sorts of reasons...like a hacker aiming a flashing a jammer at it, until the owner becomes annoyed with all the false alarms and turns off the monitoring

I agree with pretty much all of this. However, isn't the obvious conclusion to turn off the wireless once you get control of the car? True there might be other trackable items in the car, but they'd almost certainly become apparent witha matrix perception test made before attempting to steal the vehicle.

An agent would make excellent security for detecting if things go offline.

If you own a car, and you own and agent, you could instruct the car to offer the agent 3 mark on the vehicle. Now the agent can always spot the car if it is on the matrix. In order to hide the car from the agent, you would first need to remove the agent's marks.

The problem is that agents can't be run on Commlinks, so this option isn't available for your average car owner.


It's not a bad point. If you locate all the icons from a distance before you attempt to steal the car, you should be able to find the objects generating the icons and either toss them on the ground or put them in a wifi inhibiting bag (if they are valuable enough to steal too.) It's probably a few minutes of extra work compared to turning on a jammer, but it's a lot more subtle than driving around with a jammer on, especially if you have the time.

In theory, you should be able to turn the wifi off from inside the car once you've hacked it enough to allow you to drive it in manual.



My advice on a car stealing decker:
1) Make sure you have a
Chop Shop contact with a nice high loyalty. Every car you bring the contact will net you an immediate Loyalty X 5% of base price no questions asked (SR5 p419). That's good money for a car you probably don't want to keep very long, and probably can't keep between missions. (Although I'm not sure you can make your own contacts in missions?)
2) Buy a morphing license plate for $1000 (Stolen Souls p156) and install it on the car when you steal it (and remove it when you're done.) Using a stolen car on a run is a lot safer when it doesn't have plates that match a stolen car listing, especially in a setting with lots of automated camera systems.
3) Get a Body Armor Bag (Run & Gun p70, capacity 4) with Universal Mirror Material (Run & Gun p84, fills capacity 3) with a Rating of 5 providing Noise 10 ($2,000 total). You now have an armored wifi blocking bag that can be opened and worn in a pinch. Useful for throwing objects that might laced with tracking tags/etc into when you are in a hurry, among other things.

You don't think that something like this exists as a service?


Stealing a car to use on a run is a cool, albeit risky idea. However, in SR5



Also, have you considered painting the car in order to fool automated public surveillance systems on the lookout for a certain stolen vehicle?

It certainly would (and not just for cars), but the fact that it's not described in SR5 (or any edition that I'm aware of) suggests that it's not something omnipresent or routine.

As a service, too, you're introducing a new point of vulnerability as well as getting the service, because the service provider could themselves be hacked or spoofed or otherwise deceived, or possibly even be used as an attack vector. Plus whoever is running the service gets to legally track you movements with your cooperation! It's not only 'runners who might not love that - in SR, most people have something to hide.

On top of that, such a service will cost money - nothing like this in SR is free/cheap, and as we all know, if something appears to be free/cheap in SR, there's going to be one hell of a hidden cost. So a lot of people aren't going to be able to afford such a constant watch on their vehicles.

Finally, as discussed, vehicles are going to constantly go on/off the grid, so you can't have an agent report every time a vehicle falls off and expect anything but a lot of annoying notifications and false positives. An agent will thus need to be smart in some way, and only actually alert people in certain situations. I would imagine that, this being Shadowrun, the sort of corporations who provide this kind of service aren't going to be exactly super-diligent unless you're paying out the nose for "Platinum" monitoring or the like. Much easier and cheaper to simply cover up failures, either with pay-offs ("out-of-court settlement with NDA") or simple intimidation (lawyers or muscle - access to justice/courts seems pretty damn weak for almost everyone except the rich in SR) than to do a great job.

People who work for major corporations may well have this sort of thing set up by said corporations, but you know for sure their boss will be able to see where their car is too, and his boss to see both your cars and so on, and I suspect typical corporate paranoia may well end up shooting down the mass implementation of such a scheme (IRL note - I worked for a business which was basically setting up this kind of system, and whilst some people were gung-ho initially, that changed really damn fast once they realized who would be able to see what, and that relatively junior IT and security people would have to have access to this kind of info - and indeed that it might get nicked).

So I think such systems would exist, but they wouldn't be routinely seen, and would have their drawbacks. Nothing is free, nothing is perfect. For the average citizen (corporate or otherwise) in SR, this is far more true than it is for our world.

@Sendaz - Sedanrun isn't an artifact of vehicles being too easy to sell/steal. That's completely getting the wrong end of the stick, and trying to make vehicles harder to steal to fight Sedanrun is treating the symptoms (badly) not the cause. Sedanrun is an artifact of the risk/reward structure of Shadowrun sometimes being messed up, in that 'runners are basically severely underpaid by default, compared to the prices of things in the world (and also, to be fair, some illegal things are way too cheap in the SR world). But that's a whole other thread. Suffice to say, vehicles are plenty hard enough to steal in SR without resorting to making it harder than the rules already allow. Obviously if the players try to make a living stealing cars and not doing 'runs, that's not because of the cars or the rules.

That is entirely true.

The SedanRun™ joke goes back a ways to THIS and THIS threads discussing run payouts and what a runner should be getting.

Thanks for the detailed perspective.

You could make your world such that car owners can't afford monitoring, that geolocation isn't accepted by the masses, and that people don't tolerate annoying messages saying that their car has lost connectivity.

Spoofing the car to make it appear to still be safe and sound, or hacking the anti-theft system are reasonable ways to get around the issue.

Regarding payout, I don't see it that way. To me it looks like some players aren't satisfied with what they can get power-wise out of character generation. To take min-maxing to an extreme, just pick Magic E and Resources D. Min-max Attributes, Skills and Edge. Then once the game has started and you're no longer restricted to starting gear availability, begin your career as a thief and simply steal until you make enough money to purchase the high-end things you want. Advocates of this will insist that it's risk-free and highly rewarding. After that, they can begin going on runs with the power level they want.

A decker good enough to be a professional shadowrunner is elite, right? It SHOULD be almost impossible to secure things from the elite. Otherwise, there is no point in being elite, and the whole game/world is stupid.
Mostly a professional shadowrunner should only feel challenged when breaking in to a black site hidden in the alps or extracting a guy from the Azzie pyramid in Seattle. If jacking a nice car on the street is a big challenge, you are just not very good, and therefore shouldn't be getting paid 15K for a nights work. Because if you can't steal a car, while literally millions of other people in the world can, you also can't hack the your target's security system. And if you can hack your target's security system, but you can't steal a car, it's because the GM doesn't want you to steal a car, and he's cheating.

Hmm, do three marks suffice for automatic spotting?


I try my best to ignore the rule that decks can't run Common Use programs...but since the OP mentioned this being for Missions, he probably has to abide it

Not such a challenge, but using other people's cars as your preferred joyride when going on a run introduces more things that can go wrong. It's arguably reckless behavior. Why not just get your own vehicle that has all the loose ends taken care of?

To address your argument, I've heard that line of thinking before. In 5th ed, skills go to 12, but starting characters are limited to 6. So no, not all shadowrunners are elite, but any team should be able to get a stolen car. Should they choose to do that, they should at least make some effort to prevent getting caught for it. If nobody on the team has any helpful knowledge skills like identifying suitable cars, or knowing when the cops patrol; if nobody thought to disable nearby security cameras; if witnesses weren't taken into account; if the runners actually jack the car in person; if this is done repeatedly with no attention to detail and a general sense that you can just take things because of how cool it is to be a runner, then yeah, complications will arise.

If the team took the car theft as seriously as they would a high-level extraction, then of course they would get away clean. Too bad used and stolen car parts can't be fenced for much in 5th ed.

Which is fine. My first mission, we boosted a bread truck to take into the CZ. It turned out to be a good choice because we ended up with the back full of gangers we helped out of a sticky situation. The GM felt that fencing stolen cars was outside of what Missions was about, and I didn't disagree, I just dropped it, and we'll let the universe decide where it ended up. My character didn't care.
The second mission had a real rigger, so I got to do what I do best. Look for signal's and hide behind the giant troll.

Icons with your marks on them can not hide from you. You can always spot an icon (like a persona, or a car in this case) on the matrix if it has at least one of your marks on it.

Three marks just makes it tougher to remove.

The way I remembered it, only the owner got the automatic spotting. But you are right indeed: You can always keep track of your marks, so you can spot an icon you have a mark on without a test, no matter the distance. (p. 235)


@Shemhazai: A stolen vehicle can cause unwanted attention, but so can taking an identical car to different crime scenes. I'd say it biols down to a question of the character's personal style, both ways have their pros and cons.

Let me start by saying that I agree. but....

One of the original premises of Shadowrun has been lost with this line of thinking. The way runs used to work was the Johnsone would say "I need you to do this. Take this access code and this information that gives you a one off window to get into A". The pay would suck but the benefit of the run was not so much the pay, but the opportunities the Johnson has afforded you.

A run I just GM'ed was for the group to break into a delta clinic and steal an arm for the Johnson. The Johnson knew about the arm and knew that there would be excess stock and reduced security (due to unusual circumstances). So the crew was able to break an and grab a few pieces of gear (Not deltaware) that they could re-sell later on. This is something they couldn't have otherwise accomplished on their own.

So running should be about the indirect benefits making the pay worthwhile. Stealing cars and selling them doesn't allow for this. All that being said, the rewards offered in the base book are crazily low.