Honda Civic was carjackers' favorite model to steal in 2018

peterZ

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https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/honda-civic-most-stolen-car-pickup-truck/

from the article:

Honda Civic drivers, your car is wanted. The Japanese compact car was 2018's most stolen vehicle, according to the latest report from the National Insurance Crime Bureau released last month.

The organization puts together an annual "Hot Wheels" report to look at the 10 cars thieves snag every year, and last year, there were 38,426 reports of Honda Civics stolen. It's important to note the report only looks at data submitted by law enforcement agencies across the US. If no one reported a car stolen, it won't show up.

The most popular model year of Civic stolen was, believe it or not, the 2000 Civic. That's surely a testament to just how many of them are still on the road today. (There aren't thousands of Chevy Cavaliers stolen annually, for example.) Total, the organization counted 5,290 Civics hailing from the 2000 model year stolen last year alone.

Right behind the Civic was another Honda: the Accord. The report put Honda's family sedan in second place with 36,815 Accords reported stolen last year. The most popular year of the sedan was the 1997 model year, with 5,029 of them displaced from owners.
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As the article states, this is heavily related to the Civic and Accord being among the most numerous cars on the roads today. I would be more interested to see which car has the highest proportion of stolen/sales.
 
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peterZ

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As the article states, this is heavily related to the Civic and Accord being among the most numerous cars on the roads today. I would be more interested to see which car has the highest proportion of stolen/sales.
I agree. That is a big factor not taken into the equation. I think there are less manual transmission vehicles stolen just because not everyone knows how to use a clutch, and that "saves" a lot of our cars. I was very surprised to see that Teslas are way down on the list of stolen cars.
 

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I'd also be curious to know *how* they were stolen. Unattended left running, cloned keyless systems, etc. But I do think it's, in some sense, a math problem with supply and demand.
 


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Older used Civics and Accords have been the favorite choice of thieves for what seems like forever. It's all about chop shops and re-selling their parts...
Exactly what I was gonna say, older civics have always been at or near the top of the list for pretty much as long as i've been behind the wheel of a car.
 

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What I'd love to see is a heat map of where these cars were stolen.
Not where you live. :thumbsup: Try Charleston, VW. But you have the best chance of having your car stolen in Albuquerque, NM. Then Anchorage, AK. If you can't move there, or to Pueblo, CO, just go to sunny California for the best odds of never seeing your car again. The New Year's Day and other holidays are the best times to leave your car unattended in some dark spot.



https://www.nicb.org/news/news-releases/nicbs-2018-hot-spots-vehicle-theft-report
 

PEPSIFLAME

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This is pretty common knowledge though. Even non car people I know will tell you that Civics are the most stolen cars in the US.
 

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Not where you live. :thumbsup: Try Charleston, VW. But you have the best chance of having your car stolen in Albuquerque, NM. Then Anchorage, AK. If you can't move there, or to Pueblo, CO, just go to sunny California for the best odds of never seeing your car again. The New Year's Day and other holidays are the best times to leave your car unattended in some dark spot.



https://www.nicb.org/news/news-releases/nicbs-2018-hot-spots-vehicle-theft-report
Thanks for posting this. I'm thankfully nowhere near Charleston because it's pretty sketchy there.

This map surprises me because I expected a lot more theft near port cities where the cars can be quickly loaded onto shipping containers and sent overseas.
 


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Older Civics, 5th gen from 96 to 98, get stolen for a few reasons. The door locks and ignitions can be turned with a shaved key. The cars run great and are fun to drive. And there are so many of them on the road there is plenty of demand for parts.

How do I know this? Two of those 30,000+ thefts last year were my 1998 Civic coupe. It was stolen out of my driveway early in the morning in April of last year. Fortunately it was ditched a few miles from my house and the police found it later that day. The door locks and ignition were intact. And I had the only proper keys. The thieves took it for a ride, cleaned out some stuff I had in it, and parked it.

Oh, and it has a manual transmission. So the belief that a MT will keep your older Civic from being stolen is ridiculous.

After that I knew they could take it any time (they knew where I parked it every night), so I went to pulling the fuel pump relay out when I parked the car in my driveway. But I didn't pull the relay when I parked it elsewhere. A few months later I parked at Costco on a Friday evening, was gone for 20 minutes... and my car was gone before I got back. Found out a group of thieves had been working that Costco for the previous month, stealing just older Civics (I found the list of recently stolen vehicles from the local PD; mine was the fourth Civic stolen from that Costco parking long in a span of two weeks.)

A few days went by, I figured it was gone. So I bought my 2018 Civic. And then the cops found my '98 abandoned a few miles from where it had been stolen... again with no damage to the locks or ignition.

If my experience is typical, then a lot of Civics are stolen with shaved keys for short rides, even if they have manual transmissions.
 

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Carjacking is a crime of opportunity. It's more due to the ubiquity of these cars than anything else, I think.

You can't be choosy when you're car jacking.
 

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In the case of cars like the 6th Gen Civic or the Integras from that era, they've outlived their supply of cheap parts and don't have a factory immobilizer (not relevant to a car jacking situation), which is why they're popular targets for thieves.

An alarm across a critical circuit or a kill switch would probably stop most thieves except for the most determined ones. That's a very inexpensive investment.
 

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Older Civics, 5th gen from 96 to 98, get stolen for a few reasons. The door locks and ignitions can be turned with a shaved key. The cars run great and are fun to drive. And there are so many of them on the road there is plenty of demand for parts.

How do I know this? Two of those 30,000+ thefts last year were my 1998 Civic coupe. It was stolen out of my driveway early in the morning in April of last year. Fortunately it was ditched a few miles from my house and the police found it later that day. The door locks and ignition were intact. And I had the only proper keys. The thieves took it for a ride, cleaned out some stuff I had in it, and parked it.

Oh, and it has a manual transmission. So the belief that a MT will keep your older Civic from being stolen is ridiculous.

After that I knew they could take it any time (they knew where I parked it every night), so I went to pulling the fuel pump relay out when I parked the car in my driveway. But I didn't pull the relay when I parked it elsewhere. A few months later I parked at Costco on a Friday evening, was gone for 20 minutes... and my car was gone before I got back. Found out a group of thieves had been working that Costco for the previous month, stealing just older Civics (I found the list of recently stolen vehicles from the local PD; mine was the fourth Civic stolen from that Costco parking long in a span of two weeks.)

A few days went by, I figured it was gone. So I bought my 2018 Civic. And then the cops found my '98 abandoned a few miles from where it had been stolen... again with no damage to the locks or ignition.

If my experience is typical, then a lot of Civics are stolen with shaved keys for short rides, even if they have manual transmissions.
That's interesting, I was not aware that this kind of car theft is common anywhere. It's apparently so easy to break into these cars that some individuals can use them as free rides or to safely steal what might be inside. It doesn't even qualify as GTA, so the penalty wouldn't be great. In CA, they would probably just release the perpetrator even if they caught him.
 

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In the case of cars like the 6th Gen Civic or the Integras from that era, they've outlived their supply of cheap parts and don't have a factory immobilizer (not relevant to a car jacking situation), which is why they're popular targets for thieves.
This.

They're easy to steal and can turn a profit in a chop shop since (last I saw) car makers were not required to continue to make parts for a model after 10 years of it being discontinued.. along with the fact 20 year old Civics and Accords are still on the road. You can pop the locks with a shaved key or... hell... a screwdriver. Cavaliers… Escorts... Grand Ams… they're just as easy to steal but the market for parts isn't there and fewer are still on the road. Stealing a car from the junk yard sucks when there's no battery... the coolant lines are cut... and the car is on blocks.
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