The recent report that auto thefts fell 21% in the U.S. in the first half of the year reminds me of a friend's carjacking some 30 years ago — surely the shortest in history.
My overeducated friend, with degrees from Brown and the Sorbonne, had just added a certification as an auto mechanic and liked cars that required constant tinkering. While driving near his home in Washington, DC, one afternoon, he stopped at a stop sign, and a pedestrian motioned to him that he had a question. Tim rolled down his window, and the man shoved a gun in his face, ordering him out of the car.
The man got in, engaged the clutch and drove... two feet. He tried again, but the car stalled after two more feet. He tried a third time. A fourth. He hadn't even made it halfway into the intersection before he jumped out, threw the keys at Tim's chest and ran off.
I'd never thought of having a diseased clutch as an anti-theft device but have watched with interest over the years as actual devices have continually improved. They've now gotten to the point that, combined with other factors, thefts fell 17% in 2024, tumbled 23% last year, to the lowest levels in decades, and are way down again this year. The good news for insurers is likely to continue, too.
Let's have a look.
Some of my optimism stems simply from the steady modernization of the car fleet. Even though soaring prices for cars have encouraged people to hold on to cars longer than in the past, older, more vulnerable cars are steadily being retired, and that trend will continue.
In the face of public pressure, companies whose cars were most likely to be stolen have also issued software patches and other updates — as a result, the percentage of car thefts of Kias and Hyundais fell to 14% of the total last year, from 16% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, even as the total of thefts dropped precipitously.
Meanwhile, the supply chain has sorted itself out post-COVID, so thieves can't rack up the sorts of profits they did from stealing scarce parts in recent years. The U.S. war on Iran may unsettle the supply chain again, including by pushing sales of electric vehicles during a time of high gasoline prices, but the effects have been muted so far, and I suspect they'll remain so.
Law enforcement has stepped up efforts to prevent all sorts of crimes, and car thefts are a visible target at just about all levels of policing. I'm not sure how much more severe enforcement can become, but, especially in a fraught political environment, I don't see that anyone will relax.
Potentially the most important — but fraught — factor that will determine how much car thefts keep falling relates to surveillance technology. Flock has built a massive business by installing cameras on roads nationwide that take pictures of license plates and respond to, among other things, alerts from police departments about stolen vehicles. There are lots of efforts to also figure out how to knit together all the images being gathered by dashcams, which are currently in about one in 10 vehicles in the U.S. and which are being adopted quickly.
Combining all those feeds could provide real-time intelligence for police departments, making it far easier to catch thieves and creating a massive disincentive for them to steal cars in the first place.
But....
We've also seen how surveillance can be abused, as I wrote in August. Flock faces a scandal because dozens of police officers used its technology to stalk current and former romantic partners, and the temptation to use surveillance illicitly will only increase as the technology becomes more powerful.
My gut tells me that it will take time, perhaps years, to sort through all the tensions between law enforcement and privacy but that we'll eventually get to the point where some severely circumscribed uses of license plate readers will take another cut out of auto thefts. The privacy issue is one we've mostly navigated with Ring cameras and surveillance cameras on building, so there's a blueprint for progress
The bad guys are always innovating, just as the good guys are, but I think the favorable glide path for car thefts should continue.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. My other bizarro car theft story, this one involving a nephew and an odd situation for the adjuster:
While my nephew was visiting DC last year, his Hyundai was stolen off the street by four kids — who drove the car right past him as he was talking with the police officer who responded to his report of the crime. They took the car on joy rides for a few days — as evidenced by the thousands of dollars of traffic violations they ran up in DC and Maryland — then used it in a drug deal that went bad.
The car wound up full of bullet holes, and a friend of the kids was shot. Panicking, the kids put the badly wounded girl in the trunk of the car and dumped her in front of her high school. These young geniuses then abandoned the car and tried to run off but were promptly apprehended by school security. (The girl healed fine.)
The insurance issue was that the adjuster couldn't look at the car because it was in police custody as a crime scene. So my nephew's insurer kept him in a rental car for weeks until it finally satisfied itself that the car was a total loss and wrote him a check for a new one.
My nephew spent weeks unwinding the traffic tickets. He actually had to drive to Baltimore from Philadelphia to appear in court and provide evidence that he couldn't have been at the wheel for the moving violations because he wasn't in Maryland when they occurred.