This week the FBI released its annual crime report and it shows that nationwide car theft has jumped 20% versus 2021. If you think that’s not bad, consider it’s an average of the whole country. That means in high-crime areas the increase was far higher. In other words, car theft is getting worse and by a disturbing amount.
Nashville has a problem with abandoned cars.
According to FBI data, 721,852 cars were reported stolen in the US for 2022 versus 601,453 in 2021. To give you some perspective, the total was just 420,952 in 2020. If the current trend continues, we’ll more than double the 2020 total this year.
Many news outlets are focusing on the wrong thing and trying to blame Dodge muscle cars, Kias, and Hyundais for the rise in car thefts using data from the Highway Loss Data Institute. As pointed out by the Daily Mail, the Dodge Charger Hellcat was the most broken-into car for 2022 at 6,128 theft claims for the year. To say that’s driving car theft when it constituted 0.008% of car thefts last year is beyond ridiculous.
The fact is thieves are taking whatever they want. We’ve seen reports of criminals swiping just about everything under the sun, from Teslas to Rolls-Royces. If they don’t have the tools or skills to break in and hotwire (or reprogram the ignition) on the vehicle then they’re cloning a key fob or just plain breaking into victims’ houses to steal their keys in the middle of the night.
What all this means is even if your car isn’t one of the top theft targets, you need to take extra steps to secure it. There are many ways to do this, like parking it inside the garage at night and physically security the track, keeping it locked when you’re not inside, putting your keys inside a Faraday cage when you’re not using them, having a kill switch or other extra security installed, and using a GPS tracker just in case all your prevention methods don’t stop thieves.
With car theft continuing to increase dramatically, it sadly might not be long before you or someone close to you falls victim, if it hasn’t already happened.
Images via Facebook
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