Ali Sobh’s McLaren was taken from the driveway behind his home in Detroit’s Boston-Edison neighborhood, according to WDIV, and the next time he saw it, the car was doing donuts in front of a crowd in a video posted online. Detroit officers have since recovered it near Six Mile and Telegraph, after Sobh gave police a possible location drawn from tips sent in by his social media following, which WDIV puts at 1.1 million. Neither WDIV report, published Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, mentions an arrest.
FOX 2 Detroit aired the footage, credited on screen as courtesy of Sobh, under the headline “Detroit thieves steal $500K car and rip donuts at street takeover.” The clip also carries an Instagram handle, @loco_lan420. In the frames I watched, the car slides through an intersection at night while onlookers stand on the sidewalk, and the asphalt is already scrawled with tire marks from earlier runs.
A one-off color is hard to hide
Sobh told WDIV the car is a color nobody else in the country owns: “I’m the only one in the country that has this color as well.” That is his claim. Neither report names the color or the McLaren model, so I can’t check it against factory paint records. Taking it as given, the claim changes what the car was worth to a thief. In my reading, a $500,000 car with a one-off finish can’t be listed, shipped or re-registered without drawing attention, which leaves two options: hide it, or use it somewhere nobody asks questions. A takeover looks like the second kind of place until the phones come out. Every person filming a donut is also documenting the car, the location and the date.
The Houston case The Auto Wire covered last month went the other way: police there say a theft ring had $3 million in luxury cars delivered to it, and some turned up in New Jersey labeled as rebar. That crew was trying to make cars disappear. Whoever put this McLaren in front of a crowd did the opposite.
Stealing the car and spinning it fall under different statutes
MCL 750.413 makes it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, to willfully and without authority take possession of and drive away a motor vehicle belonging to another, and the text extends to anyone who assists in or is a party to the taking. I read the full section on the Michigan Legislature’s site. It says nothing about selling or keeping the car, so as I read it, the felony is complete once the car is driven away. Whether it reaches whoever was at the wheel in the video is a call for prosecutors, and no charges have been reported.
The donuts fall under the reckless-driving statute, MCL 257.626, which applies on highways and other places open to the public, parking areas included. The base offense, driving with “willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property,” is a misdemeanor carrying up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine. It becomes a felony with up to five years if someone suffers a serious impairment of a body function, and up to 15 years if someone dies. The section does not mention burnouts or donuts by name.
Ohio wrote them in. House Bill 56, which lawmakers sent to the governor in June 2024, adds stunt driving, covering donuts, burnouts, drifting and wheelies, to the state’s street-racing definition, and it gives people who knowingly take part in a takeover by standing in the roadway the same penalties as the drivers. My search of the Michigan Legislature’s site turned up the general reckless-driving statute rather than a takeover-specific provision, though I can’t rule out one I missed.
What to watch in the Detroit investigation
Police are working to identify and find the people responsible, according to WDIV, and Sobh’s report says the takeover footage is now part of that investigation. The first thing to watch is whether prosecutors build the case on the driveway or on the intersection, because the felony above and the misdemeanor carry very different exposure. The second is who else shows up in the footage: a Los Angeles County sheriff’s task force arrested 22 people at Bay-to-LA takeovers in one weekend, and the same logic applies in Detroit once investigators start counting faces in the crowd. Sobh told WDIV he plans to add security measures at his home.
Should people who stand in the road and cheer a street takeover face the same charges as the driver, or should the law stop at the person behind the wheel?