QOTD: Have You Been the Victim of Auto Theft?
Ford will make some F-150 owners partially whole again if their truck gets stolen.
I am curious -- how many of you have actually had a car stolen? Or carjacked?
I don't personally know very many people it has happened to, but of course we know it's a thing that happens.
So, let's do an informal survey.
Has it happened to you?
You know what to do -- sound off below.
[Image: GBJSTOCK/Shutterstock.com]
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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Yup. My 1980 Buick Regal was stolen twice in one day! In the morning, somebody got in, smashed the plate on the steering column to bypass the key, and hot-wired it to start. They burned out the elternator, and got about 60 miles before the battery died, and then stole the plates.
The car was found by the CHP on a remote stretch of the interstate and towed that afternoon, when the car was stolen again, by Governor Pete Wilson. He was law and order even as mayor of San Diego, but wanted the cops to work for minimum wage. He had slashed the rural CHP office to just the dispatchers, the station captain, and a secretary.
My car sat in the impound yard for 40 days, until the CHP captain brought in all the patrolmen to catch up on the pile of paperwork that hadn't been processed by the two laid-off office workers, and I was notified that day where my car was. It was covered with dirt, had four flat tires that weren't mine - someone at the yard had taken my near-new tires and wheels.
There was a $1230 fee for a car I'd paid $900 for in 1992 and now needed a new alternator and tires to drive, along with new registration and other repairs, and I had already gotten another car, so I handed the yard the pink slip and left them to dispose of it.
My Mom went to get the morning paper and noticed that my Dad's '89 Cutlass Ciera was missing from the driveway. It was found a few days later sans the engine. I would image the thieves were under the impression they had located a V6, but the car had a noisy Iron Duke under the hood.
Thieves are not the smartest bunch on earth!!🚗🚗🚗