Any idea on which car is least likely to be taken by thieves?
The HLDI – or Highway Loss Data Institute – has records of about 85 percent of the insured vehicles in the US. We are repeating the very first information Matt Moore, senior vice president at HLDI, gives at the video above. But that is just to show they have strong numbers to support their studies. And they point Tesla vehicles are among the less likely to be ever stolen. Surprisingly, they are beaten in this ranking by a German competitor: the BMW 3 Series.
Before we go into the numbers themselves, it is important to check the methodology. HLDI has to sort the claims. Some of them are about objects stolen inside the car. Others, for stolen parts, such as the wheels. And there are the whole-vehicle claims, in which the cost of the claim exceeds the value of the vehicle. These were the focus of this study.
HLDI reached the conclusion that the average whole-vehicle theft claims were 0.27 per 1,000 insured vehicles. Anything equal to 0.27 is 100 percent.
Then HLDI dived into the numbers of each model with a 2016 to a 2018 model year and made the relative claim frequency chart below. The lowest the number, the better.
Tesla Model S is in second place, with only 11 percent of relative claim frequency. The Model X has a 12 percent relative claim frequency. Surprisingly, the BMW 3 Series has only 4 percent relative claim frequency, from a single whole-vehicle theft claim reported among 104,901 insured vehicle years.
In other words, among each year of insurance for each BMW 3 Series from 2016 to 2018 model year. At least the ones that HLDI managed to gather data about.
HLDI states low relative claim frequencies are common among electric vehicles. Not only Tesla models. The reason would be that they are “usually parked in garages or close to a house to be near a power supply”. It would have shown that in a previous report, but that does not seem to explain the whole story.
Check all the least stolen vehicles on the list above. There is no other EV apart from the Tesla cars. The closest vehicle to them would be the Lexus RX 450h, a hybrid. If that explanation was correct, we would see at least the Nissan Leaf among the 20 least stolen vehicles.
Another problem with that theory is that 3 Series are not always locked in a garage, just like electric vehicles also park on the streets as any regular car. It probably has more to do with anti-theft systems and demand.
The most stolen cars are the Dodge Charger HEMI and the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. Probably because they are fast – what makes for excellent getaway cars – have expensive parts, can be refueled anywhere, and are more common, which makes them more prone to simply vanish.
A Tesla can be tracked, demands more time for being ready for action, and has the very Sentry mode that caught a glass-breaking butt in Palo Alto. Apart from constant updates and other features that may demote bad guys to steal the company’s vehicles.
You are probably missing the Model 3, right? It was first delivered in July 2017, which could put some of them in this study even if Tesla does not use model years for its cars. But there is no data for it on this study, according to HLDI. And the institute went no further in explaining why. If you have a guess, drop us a comment on why this may have happened.
Source: HLDI via Elektrek
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