ONE MAJOR FACT OF LIFE WHICH COMES with living in Santa Monica: There’s a lot of overnight on-street parking. Which means that for thieves, it’s a paradise on wheels.
And in this column we’ll tell you some of the surprising things car/truck thieves are stealing, how they’re doing it and why (the reasons aren’t always obvious).
All our cars, trucks and motorcycles are dressed from head to toe in ever more-expensive add-ons, including (steal-able) custom wheels (rims), HID, or High Intensity Discharge headlamps (those blue-tinted ones coming at you, blinding you, late at night), custom “ground effects” kits of all types which can make vehicles look fast standing still, and are easily removed.And all that’s just on the outside.
In the engine bay and trunk, things can get serious and expensive, with sporty cars sporting turbochargers and/or superchargers, nitrous oxide kits (sometimes for the car, sometimes for the driver) which can add an instant 100-or-more-horsepower at the touch of a button, oil and transmission oil coolers and the electronics, and often some of the speakers, for on-board audio/video systems.
And your neighborhood thief hasn’t even looked inside your car or truck yet. From Wilton wool carpet “floor mats” to illuminated headliners which challenge the Griffith Observatory and Laserium (Oh, to be young again and on a date …), from racer-like seats by Recaro to add-on gauge packages and classic skull gear shift knobs, it’s become a normal, expected part of the Great American Automotive Love Affair to shower our moving objects with only the best, most expensive and most exotic.
SEMA, the Specialty Equipment Market Association, is a Diamond Bar-based automotive after-market lobbying/trade association and says Americans spend somewhere around $40 billion every year on personalizing our modest modes of transport with every item imaginable.
If you must park overnight on the street and own one of the more popular vehicles, including a Honda Civic or Accord, Toyota Camry, Saturn SL, Nissan Sentra or Acura Integra, you don’t have much to worry about when it comes to individual items being stolen from your car or truck. In your case, thieves just take the whole thing, “part it out” into its individual pieces, ship some overseas but sell most of the parts to repair shops, parts stores and dealerships.
For a long time, stereos (now called “audio systems”) were thieves’ item-of-choice. Easy to steal and fence. I had a 1974 Triumph Spitfire convertible which might as well have been the British version of Al and Ed’s.
Want to find a stolen stereo, maybe yours? Visit a local swap meet.
When airbags became standard in the mid-‘80s, it opened entirely new vistas for both the thieves and their customers who trade with “Midnight Auto Supply.”
Thieves still find it easy to heist the airbags and sell them for 10 percent or 15 percent of their actual value. Initially, only driver’s side airbags were standard (car-makers figured the driver needed to be saved so they could buy a new car; no one cared about the passenger).
Today, there are almost as many airbags on cars and trucks as cupholders. Sometimes more.
Finally, to those insecure enough to need a “raised” truck.
Thieves had been limiting themselves to ripping-off emission-reducing catalytic converters from under those trucks, stealing and re-selling them (see above: airbags), but precious metals inside the cats including platinum, palladium and rhodium are also valuable. If a thief breathes fumes from or gets these metals on their skin, just direct them to the nearest ER. It’s not pretty.
Some cat thieves eschew their profession’s standard-issue knives, files and pliers and travel with welding equipment: Easier to cleanly remove the converter.
Recently, thieves have been getting under those big trucks with their big gas tanks and stealing gasoline right out of the tank (many trucks conveniently have dual gas tanks, making for sort-of an “added-value” theft). And none of that tried-and-true “cut a length of hose, breath in, spit out and pour” method mastered in high school, either.
Today, just drill or punch a hole in the bottom of the targeted tank and cop $50 or more bucks of high-test in 2 or 3 minutes. If you try this stunt because you read about it here and blow yourself up, that’s your own damn problem.
Check-out the Grossman Burn Ward; it’s in Sherman Oaks.
In future columns we’ll tell you how to stop thieves from taking your car, truck or motorcycle for granted, either piece-by-single-piece or even as a whole item.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 19, 2008. Read the original PDF.