Prius models are not big with car thieves
We talk about many aspects of cars, driving and the car-making industry in general, however one thing that we haven’t talked about on this blog is the problem of car theft. Today we’ll change that with a look at whether or not car thieves like hybrids – it turns out that they don’t.
The Toyota Prius is not very popular with car thieves, it turns out that when compared to other models of the same age, a Prius is less likely to be stolen.
That is what the National Insurance Crime Bureau data shows, as of the end of June, only one in 606 examples of the 2008-2010 MY Prius cars had been stolen as opposed to one in 78 of all the other vehicles of the exact same model years. That is a massive difference it’s almost then times less likely to get your car stolen if it’s a Prius.
Some Prius cars do get stolen, California being the place where by far most of the cars are stolen, a bit over a thousand, with Florida, New York, Washington and Texas following way in the back of the line with around a hundred models each. But despite these numbers, the NCIB data shows that it has a whopping 96.7 percent recovery rate – that’s huge.
The major reason behind these very low numbers is that we’re talking about a hybrid here, there’s not a large market for parts because hybrid parts can only be used on the same-model car, which limits it’s use to thieves tremendously.
Besides this fact, the model is still relatively young, so there’s also not a big market for parts, also those individuals who purchase a Prius to start with, won’t be interested in getting a bit of a shady deal.
One can expect that hybrids will still be on the lower end of thefts for many years to come considering the various technologies and parts are limited to each model and each car-maker in turn, however those models that will prove to be massive hits with the buying masses might start climbing in the charts soon thereafter.