Car Theft--Which Cars, Cities, and States are Hit Hardest?

Top 10 Stolen Cars

Worst States for Stolen Cars

Worst Cities for Car Theft

Understanding Car Theft Trends and Protection Tips

In this episode of Women Buying Cars, host Meredith Reynolds delves into the alarming statistics of car theft in the United States, particularly from 2019 to 2024. Meredith discusses the most and least stolen car models, and offers practical tips to prevent car theft. She shares insights on various layers of protection, from basic security measures to advanced immobilizers and tracking systems. Additionally, Meredith highlights the benefits and appeal of the Chevy Blazer. The episode aims to raise awareness and provide actionable advice for car owners to reduce the risk of theft. This is an episode for you if you have ever wondered, "What cars are stolen the most?" "Which cars are least likely to be stolen?" "Why is car theft so high?" "Why does Kansas City have so many car thefts?" "Which cities have the highest car thefts?" "Which states have the highest car thefts?" and "Should I buy a Chevy Blazer?"

00:00 Introduction: The Alarming Reality of Car Theft
01:02 Personal Experience with Car Theft
01:44 Car Theft Statistics and Trends
02:54 Types of Car Thieves
04:50 Top Cities and States for Car Theft
06:18 Most Stolen Vehicles
10:25 Car I Love: The Chevy Blazer
14:31 Least Stolen Vehicles
15:48 Tips to Prevent Car Theft
21:31 Conclusion: Staying Safe and Grateful

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Transcript

Meredith 0:02

By the time I finish this introduction, another car will have been stolen in the United States. A car is stolen every 33 seconds. That adds up to around a million cars a year. And that's equal to six and a half billion dollars. And guess who pays for that? You and I with our insurance rates, we are all paying for the thefts even if they're not ours. Today, we're gonna talk about some of those statistics. I'm gonna tell you which cars. Are most and least stolen, and what you can do to lower the chances of being the next victim. Welcome back to Women Buying Cars. I'm your host Meredith Reynolds, co-owner of Reynolds Automotive in the Kansas City suburb of Miriam. it has been a rough month here at Reynolds Automotive. We have been dealing with car thefts and attempted car thefts, and it's violating, it's depressing, it makes me angry. It is just a whole lot of ugliness that has taken over my brain for the last month and kept me from being able to focus on what I actually need to be doing, which is building our business. So chances are, you know someone who has had their car stolen at some point. The good news is in 2024, car thefts actually came down from the previous several years. We are hoping this is a trend that will continue, but prior to that, from 2019 to 2023 car thefts steadily rose. Here in Kansas City during that timeframe, car theft rose 138%. From 2022 to 23 alone, it rose 49% Kansas City, Missouri, and I'm not talking about the whole metro. I'm talking about Kansas City, Missouri. It averages 654 cars stolen per month in 2024. If you are one city with 654 stolen cars in a month, how can you possibly track all of that down along with every other crime that's being committed? You can't, and we are definitely feeling it in Kansas City and in the metro. Like I said, we've been dealing with some car theft here outside of Kansas City, a couple of different styles. First, there are people who I consider to be amateur thieves They see an opportunity, they take it. They don't have a really good exit plan. Maybe they're young teenagers working alone, working in a very small group. The problem is these amateur thieves, with enough experience turn into the second group, which are professional thieves. Thieves are often crime rings, so it isn't just one person or a couple of friends getting together and deciding to steal a car. It's a whole organization where they have. Spent significantly more time thinking it through and planning and finding new ways to seal cars than you have thought of preventing your car from being stolen. They may be operating with people outside of the state where they're taking cars, getting it to someone else. That person's taking the car apart. Selling those parts to other people, like I said, possibly all over the country, so it's a large operating ring. A lot of times they're not just selling the car off, they're stripping it down and selling it for parts so that nothing's traceable. Other times, They're selling cars to unsuspecting buyers, maybe on. Facebook marketplace who think they're just buying from a normal person and it turns out it's a stolen vehicle. Sometimes they're getting those cars so that they can use them to commit other crimes because the crime does not end with the stolen car. Okay? there will be other crimes committed in some form with that stolen car, another market for these stolen cars is overseas. This is likely more common on the coasts. If you are in New York and a car is stolen, it could in a couple hours, be in a shipping container ready to be loaded onto a ship and taken overseas to a buyer. So, where are the most car thefts happening? Well, as far as cities go, the last report I have was for 2022, and number one per capita was Pueblo, Colorado, other cities in the top 10, Bakersville, California. Denver, Memphis, Portland, Oregon. Albuquerque, Seattle, San Francisco, Greeley, Colorado, and number 10, Kansas City, Missouri. Unfortunately, Missouri also made the top 10 state. They're the number 10 state for car thefts. In 2015, about 17,000 cars were stolen in Missouri in 2023, that number had jumped to around 30,000, so almost double in eight years. It's just completely out of control. Here in Kansas, we have a much lower rate than Missouri, but we have less than half the amount of people in Missouri. The rate has steadily inclined in Kansas as well, and we're currently somewhere around 8,500 thefts a year, so 8,500 thefts a year in Kansas and somewhere around 30,000 in Missouri. Even with over twice the population. That is skewed so far toward Missouri, and I'm just across the border in Kansas, I'm heavily affected by that because we are so close to Missouri. If you're shopping for a car, you may want to know which vehicles are more likely to be stolen and which are least likely to be stolen. The list varies year to year. And it also is going to vary based on the year of the model you're buying. So for example, Hyundai Elantra is number one as of the last statistics. However, it really only applies to Hyundai Elantras, that are from the years 2011 to 2022. So if you're looking for a 2024 Hyundai Elantra. It's not on the list, so I'll put a link in the show notes where you can look these things up and see exactly which cars are the most affected. Other vehicles on the list include other models of Hyundai and a few different models of Kia. Sadly, the reason these are easily stolen is because of social media. Trends where people are challenging one another to steal these vehicles and post it on TikTok or Instagram. And I could go on and on about how incredibly sad our world is that people would take that challenge just so they can put it on social media. But the truth is there was, A glitch that made these vehicles easier to steal. Hyundai and Kia now have software updates, which certainly help. If you had one of the affected models, you'd wanna get that software update. Essentially, it makes it. I wanna say impossible, but who knows Very hard to steal the car without the key fob. Locking the car with your fob basically puts a kill switch on the ignition so that the car will not start until that fob unlocks the car and takes the kill switch off. It seems like something that would be great on every car. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the Dodge Charger and also the Dodge Challenger are very hot items. There is a really great Facebook group here in Kansas City called Stolen KC, where people post things of theirs that have been stolen, and the community tries to help share that around in hopes of finding the lost item. There's mostly cars on there because there's so many cars stolen in this area and. I feel like every other day there's a Dodge Charger or Challenger on there. They are regularly stolen to the point that I would not recommend someone buy one. If you're looking for a sports car, you know someone looking for a sports car, that's not the one I would get because they are so readily stolen. It has a supercharged engine and a lot of times people are taking the supercharged engine out, putting it in a different vehicle, so it's not traceable or just keeping the challenger or charger and driving it. They're used for street racing, which has become a huge problem here in Kansas City. It was even reported in the Daily Mail in London this past week. There was an article about it. Which is embarrassing for Kansas City especially because we're hosting some World Cup games. Next year. One of those cars we recently had stolen is a Honda Accord, which is also on the top 10 lists of most stolen vehicles, as is the Honda Civic. The F-150 and the Chevy Silverado are also on the top 10. They're frequently stolen. However, trucks as a whole make up just 12% of vehicle thefts. Cars make up 78%. I assume SUVs are lumped in with cars. 10% is other, which I suppose is motorcycles. Before we get to the cars that are frequently left alone, we're going to stop for a segment called Cars. I love. The Car I Love Today is the Chevy Blazer. You may remember the blazer from the eighties or nineties. Chevy Stopped making it for about 15 years and now that it's come back, it is less of an off-roading vehicle, more of a streetwise vehicle. This is a two row five seater, what they call a crossover. I would call just a mid-size SUV. One thing I love about it is that it comes in the usual combustion engine version, but it also comes as all electric. It's great that you have two options when considering the blazer. I'm an electric car owner. I love an electric car. I would, in the next couple of years, love to upgrade to an electric Chevy Blazer. The thing that really stands out to me when I see a blazer is how good looking it is. Todd and I are frequently talking about the Blazers when we see one pointing them out to each other because they're so good looking. And then I was reading a professional review that compared the exterior to. A Camaro, apparently Chevy used the Camaro as inspiration in designing the blazer, which is a brilliant idea because a lot of people would love to have a Camaro or another type of sports car. So to take that and then use that as inspiration for a family. So that you're getting the good looks of the sports car without the impracticality of it. That's such a genius idea. So it is very good looking, especially when considering it's up against other family-oriented mid-size SUVs, which tend to be frankly boring. The great thing about a two row SUV if you don't need the third row is that it's so much easier to get around. It's so much easier to park and. While using the second row, you're gonna have a lot of trunk space. That's another plus for the blazer. We have one on our lot right now. It's. An electric blue color. It has black wheels, which I love it's got black interior, which I don't love. However, the black interior has red stitching, and then just a little bit of dark red on the air conditioning vents and maybe just a couple little touches of red here and there. Not too much. But just enough to give it some style. And I like the way red and light blue look together. So I think that looks really stylish. One downfall of the Chevy Blazer is that it doesn't have a great sight line outside the rear view mirror. You're kind of limited on what you can see out the back through your. Interior rear view mirror. However, the trim level that we have has a feature, I don't know what it's officially called, but I've seen this on other GM products where you can flip a little switch on the mirror and instead of seeing a mirror, you're now seeing a camera view in your rear view. There were some cars parked behind me when I was looking through the rear view as a mirror. I could see two cars behind me. When I switched over to the camera view, I could see four cars So it really increases your view to use it that way? To me, it's a bit disorienting because I'm been spending my whole life looking up in that mirror and seeing an actual mirror, so it is clearer. It is wider, it's better, but it does take some adjustment to get used to it. So if you are bored with the looks of a typical SUV and you would like something stylish and you can almost pretend you're driving a sports car, you should consider either the EV or the combustion engine. Chevy Blazer. Okay, now let's get back to talking about which vehicles are the least likely to be stolen. Some vehicles are frequently left alone and first of all, one of those would be electric vehicles. If you think about it, you need a charging cord. You need a setup to charge these vehicles, or you're gonna be outside in a well lit charging station, and thieves don't wanna deal with that, especially not professional thieves, and especially not ones who are looking for supercharged engines or transmissions. This gives me a little more peace of mind because I drive an electric vehicle, but it could always be taken by one of those amateur thieves I was talking about they could take my vehicle, drive it until the battery's dead and ditch it, because a lot of times that's what amateur thieves are doing. Taking a car, driving the heck out of it, ditching it on the side of the road and then starting over. A company that came up frequently on the list of least likely to be stolen is Volvo. They have a complex security system. And keeping their cars from being stolen is a priority for Volvo and it pays off. GMC Acadia was another one that was listed as was a Chevy Traverse. So do a little research, find out where your vehicle lands on these lists. So what can you do to protect yourself? Because let me tell you. It isn't just car dealerships who are being stolen from. People are having cars taken outta their driveway. They're going out to dinner, coming out of the restaurant and finding their cars gone. It's happening all over, and I don't want to scare you because like I tell my 9-year-old frequently, most people in the world are good. And so we don't need to constantly be scared. We just need to be aware. Most people in the world are good and the last couple of weeks I haven't been thinking about that at all. I've just been thinking about how everyone's out to get us because while I've been dealing with the car thieves, I also had someone hack into my email and therefore my Facebook, I had someone call me with some kind of scam about turning off the electricity. Fortunately, I figured that out really fast. but it just feels like there's so many terrible people in the world and it's easy to dwell on this, which I absolutely have been doing. So this is a wake up call to myself to try to focus on the good and remember that most people in the world are good. So we don't wanna put a lot of fear into people. I just want you to be aware and to maybe think of a couple things you haven't thought of before, so that you are less likely to be the next victim. experts say. The best way to prevent car theft is to have different layers of protection just as you would layer up in the winter. You need to layer your protection, so the first layer is the basics. Be cognizant of always locking your car. If you are in a small town or out in the country, you might not do these things regularly, but you probably should. It's easy, it's fast, you might as well start getting in that habit of always locking your car. Take your keys with you. Never ever leave your keys in the car again. A lot of us that live in the city probably don't do this, but some people may in some of these smaller areas where crime is really low. But you just always have to be careful because you never know. Roll up your windows all the way. I usually don't do that in the summer. I leave them cracked. But for safety, you should leave them up all the way and always park in a well lit area. So those are kind of basic things I would add to that list. If this is in your driveway, never leave your garage door opener. In your car, because it's just a matter of busting a window and they suddenly have access to your whole house. If you have a removable one, bring it in with you every night. Get in the habit of doing that. Your second layer, and this is where you would have to spend some money though when I looked into it. Some of this stuff is not expensive at all. Having an alarm. You could have an alarm installed if there's not one that comes standard on your vehicle, but you could also buy a steering wheel lock. A brake pedal lock. I've seen some that connect the steering wheel to the brake. It's one piece and I saw some online for around 50 bucks. Steering wheel column collars. I don't even know what that is, but it's on the list somehow, I guess it locks up your whole steering column. I also read about something I never heard about. It's called micro dot marking, and basically you can have this done or you can order it online and do it yourself. It's a type of clear paint but it has thousands of tiny micro dots that you can't see. with a magnifying glass. And a UV light. The police can read a code. On the micro dot and that coat has been registered to the owner of that vehicle. A little complicated maybe, but maybe not. If it's a matter of just brushing on some clear coat. Of course. I don't know how widespread. The use of that is, and how many police are actually checking cars for these things. So it doesn't do a lot of good if your car ends up in another city and the police over there have no idea that this has these micro dots. But it's an interesting technology I just learned about sometimes just having a decal in your window stating that you have an alarm system that could be enough to make. The thief, move on. None of this is foolproof. If someone wants your car badly enough and they have enough time and opportunity, they're gonna get it. But anything that makes a thief stop and say, eh, not worth my time, that's a great thing for you. The third layer is having some type of immobilizer on the engine. And again, when I looked this up, I found some for $50 and less. Some of them you can even install yourself. The idea is there's this device, you hook it up to your battery. You have a way to turn off the battery and the car dies. If you can get one of those for 50 bucks or less, that seems like a brilliant investment. And then your fourth layer is really the layer that's kind of too late, and that's tracking GPS because your car has to be stolen in order to need that. We wanna do things to keep it from getting stolen, but if it is stolen a tracking system, though not foolproof. Could be the difference between finding your car and not A lot of newer cars, if you have something like OnStar, you have the ability to track the vehicle with GPS. So that is one reason to get what's called a telematics system, which is like OnStar. Every make has their own, but that can be very helpful in tracing the vehicle. You can also get an Apple air tag for like 20, 30 bucks. Could the thieves find it? Yeah. Especially the professionals who know what they're looking for and know what to do. But for $30, I'd say that's a wise investment because it could potentially help you get your car back. I wish I knew what the answer was so that car thefts can come down and we can all feel a little safer in our own city. But I don't know what the answer is. Like I said, a million cars being stolen, the police can't take care of all of that with all the other crimes they have to investigate. Sadly, from my experience, I think that car theft has become so commonplace and cars are so rarely found that the police have maybe given up a little bit. I think that the police feel like it's not worth the time, manpower, effort that it would take to get a stolen car back. They could be using the police better in a different way, and that's sad. But I also understand that it's the reality, especially if you're understaffed. I think often the police feel like if no one was hurt, then it's probably not as big of a priority. But my point of view is the theft does not end with the stolen car. Catching a car thief could prevent horrible crimes that that person would commit. Getting that person off the street is only going to help our crime statistics. So take precaution. Remember that most people in the world are good and and be grateful for all that you have. If you're in the Kansas City area, please come see me at Reynolds Automotive. I'd love to say hi to you and help you get in the car if that's something that you need. if you have an idea for an episode, there is a wave to text me at the top of the show notes, or if you'd like to leave me a comment. I'd love to hear your own personal story about stolen vehicles, so if you'd like to share that, please send me a text. Thank you so much for listening and happy driving.