One Regulation Could Have Stopped a Nationwide Car Theft Wave. Why Don’t We Have It? – By Aaron Gordon (VICE) / Nov 1, 2023
In 2007, Canada started requiring all vehicles to have a cheap, effective anti-theft device. The U.S. didn’t. Now, it is paying the price with a surge in Kia and Hyundai thefts.
The U.S. is dealing with an unprecedented wave of car thefts as thieves target some nine million Kias and Hyundais manufactured between 2011 and 2021. People who bought those vehicles had no idea they were buying cars with built-in vulnerabilities. Many have had their cars stolen multiple times, which causes real hardship in both stark monetary terms and also psychological trauma. Those who cannot afford to absorb tens of thousands of dollars in losses to buy a different car are stuck with one that’s easy to steal, and even those who own models not directly affected are seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket for simply owning a car made by the same brand.
None of this is happening in Canada, despite many of the same Kias and Hyundais being sold north of the border. This is because, in 2005, Canada enacted a simple regulation that made all cars harder to steal.
As part of Motherboard’s ongoing coverage of the Kia-Hyundai theft issue, involving more than 125 public information requests and interviews with victims and experts, I’ve been trying to answer what I hoped would be a simple question: Why doesn’t the United States have a similar regulation? Unfortunately, I didn’t find any satisfying answers. Instead, I found bigger questions about why the U.S. has no serious anti-theft regulations and how its regulatory agencies think about crime prevention—which is to say, in some cases, not at all.
