Commodore still popular with thieves

The National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council has released 2015 car theft data for Australia – and Holden's VE Commodore has overtaken the VT Commodore /australian-vehicle-theft-stats-revealed-45319 as the car that is the preferred target for car thieves.

In the year before, 643 examples of the VE Commodore were stolen – some way shy of the 764 VT Commodores stolen in 2014. But last year thieves nicked 807 VE Commodores, versus 'just' 703 units of the VT Commodore. Ranked in second place Toyota's HiLux (model years 2005-2011) was posted missing by owners on 780 occasions during 2015. The Nissan N15 Pulsar was third, with 748 stolen for the year.

Fourth was the VT Commodore (703 stolen), followed in fifth by VX Commodore (591), Ford's BA Falcon (566), VY Commodore (561), VZ Commodore (457), 1998-2004 Toyota HiLux (404) and AU Falcon (402).

According to the CARS (Comprehensive Auto-theft Research System) data, the trend has been downwards for automotive theft in Australia. For 2015 the number of incidents rose (41,587 versus 39,612 for 2014), but the longer-term trend remains on the slide, and the 2015 figure was lower than 2013 and the two years prior to that.

With each passing year, the CARS data reveals, older cars are statistically less likely to be targeted by thieves. Cars built and sold during the past 20 years are more likely to have been stolen in 2015 than they were during the previous year. But only 27.7 per cent of cars stolen last year were built during the 1990s, whereas 32.4 per cent of vehicles stolen in 2014 were built in the 1990s.That rate of disinterest increases geometrically as cars age. Cars from the 1980s represented 5.9 per cent of theft in 2014, but only 4.2 per cent in 2015. And cars from the 1970s or earlier accounted for less than one per cent in 2014 and 2015. This possibly indicates that thieves have standards to maintain, and older, classic cars are kept more secure.

Despite mandatory engine immobiliser fitment, vehicles fitted with the ADR-approved anti-theft measure still accounted for 70.6 per cent of theft last year. That was 29,341 cases. Of the balance, 1472 vehicles (3.5%) were fitted with an engine immobiliser that didn't comply with ADRs, and 10,774 vehicles (25.9%) weren't fitted with an immobiliser of any kind.

South-east Queensland is a hot spot for car theft, the CARS data reveals. In 2015 theft in Brisbane declined slightly to 1573 cases, but on the Gold Coast, cases rose from 1029 in 2014 to 1166. Victoria's City of Hume placed third, with 834 cars stolen last year. Fourth was the ACT, followed by Logan, Geelong, Brimbank, Whittlesea, Dandenong and Blacktown.

The quietest time of day for car theft is the hour before lunch on a Wednesday, according to CARS. It should come as no surprise that Saturday nights and prior to 6am on Sunday is peak hour for car crime, but the very worst time – the period when theft is at its worst – is the four-hour period before midnight on Friday.

You can read more about the CARS stats on the website.