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Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

> If you've read about carjacking waves in places like Milwaukee and Chicago: that was largely driven by a decision Kia made, which resulted in the nationwide deployment of a giant fleet of "burner" cars that could be stolen with nothing but a bent USB cable.

"A nationwide epidemic of Kia thefts" seems to be a natural consequence of decreased security. However, that carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago specifically would follow from a nationwide omission of interlocks is not obvious as the vehicles are easily stolen without the need for personal confrontation. What is the connection of Kia interlocks to carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago?

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> However, that carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago specifically would follow from a nationwide omission of interlocks is not obvious as the vehicles are easily stolen without the need for personal confrontation.

I think parent-poster means that the easily-stolen cars are being used as tools of carjacking, rather than the targets of it. In particular, carjacking that occurs by somehow provoking a victim to stop on the highway shoulder, a location where attackers can't exactly arrive by foot or bus or bike. That way they don't involve a vehicle that might be observed and traced back to them.

An alternate explanation is that they meant to write something like "theft" and accidentally put down "carjacking" instead.

This is correct, the usual procedure is: steal kia or hyundai with your friends using the no-interlock exploit --> find other cars to carjack (at gunpoint), or individuals to rob --> ditch stolen cars when no longer needed. Exploit no-pursuit policies as needed.

I've posted this point a couple times on HN and I guess I will keep posting until people stop expressing surprise that trivially stealable cars are a precursor to carjackings. I'm not dunking, there's no good reason for people to intuit that! But it's a really important thing to understand.

Thanks and thanks to the upthread explanations.

Part of what makes it unintuitive is the specificity:

  * Why Milwaukee and Chicago instead of everywhere?
  * Why carjacking and not a general increase in crimes that could be facilitated by an unassociated car (bank robbery, toll violations, etc)?

FWIW the associated crime wave was much broader than carjacking (and I’m actually not aware of a particular increase in carjackings specifically due to the Kia issues but I don’t know) but the Kia issues seem to have started in Milwaukee.

For whatever reason, it became A Thing here more than a year before it went national. Car thefts in Milwaukee more than doubled (entirely due to a stupidly large increase in Kia/Hyundai thefts) and we got a reputation for Kia thefts before it became a national issue

I question whether Milwaukee and Chicago are outstanding examples. I looked at a few reputable sources and those cities nor their states seem to be extremes in terms of car theft rates. Most of these law enforcement agencies are not specifically breaking our carjacking.

Random presentation of car theft stats comparing Chicago to a handful of others. We hear a lot about Chicago because many have a vested interest in deflecting discussions about crime. When was the last time you heard about the insane motor vehicle theft rate of Dallas? https://public.tableau.com/shared/W2KZH4JC7?:display_count=y...

Hell Mississippi as a state might soon pass Chicago in murder rate per capita. Chicago last year had a murder rate of 22.85 per 100,000 while Mississippi had a murder rate of 20.7 per 100,000. Louisiana had 19.8 and Alabama had 18.6..

Chicago isn't even in the top 10 per capita. It's just a very big city that everybody forgets is a very big city.

The phenomenon started in Milwaukee (the "Kia Boys" challenge), and I happen to live in Chicagoland, which experienced a huge wave of carjackings immediately afterwards. I have one of them recorded on my Nest camera in the alley behind my house. Nothing in particular about those two cities otherwise.

As the sibling points out: it's a broader issue than just carjackings --- but the carjackings themselves were novel, scared the shit out of people in a way that stochastic-seeming strong arm robberies don't. The headline here is: it was a gravely negligent thing for Kia to have done; I hope they lose their shirts.

Why Milwaukee and Chicago instead of everywhere?

It wasn't just in those cities, it was nationwide. The poster was using those cities as examples because they are familiar to him.

"Places like" include Philadelphia. It's not a closed set, just some examples. I have friends that have had their KIA stolen this way, and others that have outright sold their car to get a different brand due to how prevalent it is here.

I'd really like to see a citation for carjackings going up more than any other crime that a stolen car enables.

Cars are hard to fence and if you have a stolen car there's other crimes you can commit that have similar upsides and lower sentences/risks. For example ATMs never run over your buddies or shoot back at you.

Carjacked cars are usually recovered. They're not carjacked so they can be sold on some weird car black market.

All stolen cars are usually recovered. The recovery rate is something like 85%.

I worry that single percentage might be hiding some complexities like a subcategory of cars with a much lower recovery rate, or having the term "recovered" encompassing "as scrap".

Or the same car keeps getting stolen as someone else suggested. So the % of distinct cars may be lower.

Like cyber exploits then. Get someone to click a link to download something then access their email to send someone else an email and so on.

Having a stolen car means the easiest way to identify someone is now non-identifying. It’s a great precursor to avoid being tracked.

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