Car Theft Australia Statistics

You know you wouldn’t really think in this day and age many cars would get stolen, but latest figures from the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council (NMVTRC – long bloody name) tell a different story. The latest figures from NMVTRC state that every 6 mins, a car is stolen somewhere in Australia. Which makes it about 240 cars a day, 1680 cars a week or 6720 cars a month! Amazing! So if you have never had your car stolen, you’d think this shouldn’t really affect you, but it does, because every year insurance companies charge $1 billion dollars more for higher insurance premiums due to car theft.

The Australian Capital Territory is the worse place to live if you care about your car. With a theft rate of 0.002, in otherwords, 1 out of every 500 cars gets stolen every year! If you think about it, 1/500 isn’t as odd as you might think! However the stats don’t exactly apply to all cars evenly as older, less secure cars attract more attention from theives than newer, more secured cars (more on this later). So hows does your state rank?

Chance of your car being stolen

ACT – 0.002%
NT – 0.0015%
SA – 0.0015%
TAS – 0.0013%
VIC – 0.0011%
WA – 0.0011%
QLD – 0.0009%

Most of the time when your car is stolen, you tend to get it back, one way or another, however, different states have different recovery rates. Tasmania seems to be the best place to have your car stolen, since you have a 92% chance of getting it back. List of all states below

Chance of getting your car back after having it stolen

TAS 92%
ACT 78%
NT 75%
QLD 70%
VIC 67%
NSW 63%

So, in the first 3 months of this year 18,733 vehicles worth $137 million were stolen around Australia. So from begining of April 2005 till end of March 2006 (12 months) 76,959 vehicles were stolen! So maybe your car isn’t as safe as it looks? It all depends on the car. Theives have for the most part given up trying to steal cars with half decent security systems. The once thief magnets like the Subaru Impreza WRX are no where to be seen on the most stolen list due to Subaru’s introduction of PIN coded start systems.

So then, theifs are after older cars, and whats more scary is that the older cars have a much lower recovery rate than newer cars, mainly because older cars aren’t just stolen for joy rides, but they are usually sold off or kept for spare parts! Reports show that in 2005 only 6% of expensive ($30,000+) cars were never found while more than 50% of cars that were not recovered were worth less than $6000 and 75% of cars not recovered were worth less than $15,000.

Most stolen cars in the first quarter of 2006:

Holden Commodore VN, VH, VL
Ford Laser KB, KC, EA
Ford Falcon EA, XF
Hyundai Excel X3
Tarago YR22

To read the whole report, click here