MutatedMango
Senior Member
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2019
- Threads
- 13
- Messages
- 488
- Reaction score
- 205
- Location
- Philadelphia
- Vehicle(s)
- '19 Civic Si FC3
Wow you really like civic coupes huhOlder 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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