on Sat, 23 Oct 1999 08:09:26 -0500
"Jan Schmidt" (Bill Schmidt cs rx7 kc reg) <jschmidt@kumc.edu> wrote:
>
> This info ...
} A recent study by the National Insurance Crime Bureau ranked the most
} commonly stolen vehicles in America. The top ten are:
} 1. Honda Accord
} 2. Toyota Camry
} 3. Chevrolet C/K Pickup
} 4. Jeep Cherokee/Grand Cherokee
} 5. Honda Civic
} 6. Oldsmobile Cutlass
} 7. Ford F-series Pickup
} 8. Fort Mustang
} 9. Dodge Caravan
} 10. Toyota Corolla
> ... is pretty meaningless. These also happen to be the top
>selling vehicles last year! What would really be interesting, would
>be top stolen vehicles as a percentage of their total U.S. sales.
>I bet they would be: Corvette, Supra, RX7, 300zx , 911, Boxter, M3,
>Integra R, Miata, etc
Some cars are hard to steal ("splackable" GM cars now have an
anti-theft system) and some make better battering rams or are
better able to carry your fellow gang members than others. Thus
the (regionally varying) reason for theft matters a lot. Common
4-passenger cars that kids know how to steal will top the list
for cheap transportation that is less expensive to the insurer
than when the car is stripped or sold. Some of the above are
probably returned with little damage, while others might have
been used as battering rams in a 'smash-and-grab' robbery.
In any case, the answer to this question (and similar insurance cost
questions) is documented in various ways by the HLDI and IIHS folks
on their respective web sites. For example, the slightly date
http://www.carsafety.org/news_releases/pr052599.htm
summarizes top theft _losses_ (the dollar cost for replacement or
theft-related damage repairs) and claim _frequencies_ in relative
numbers based on national averages, plus a graph of the actual
costs and theft rates that define that average. Your guess is
close on some, wrong on others.
They also provide a collection of data on $$$ losses for all cars
with enough statistics to be of interest at
http://www.carsafety.org/ictl/ictl.htm
again using average rates as the basis for comparison.
Corresponding death rate data is provided by IIHS (which also
does private crashworthiness tests on mass-market vehicles) at
http://www.highwaysafety.org/vehicle_ratings/ddr/ddr.htm
about which the HLDI comments "Sports cars tend to have high death
rates because they're more likely to be in high-speed single-vehicle
crashes in which the risk of fatality is high. However, insurance
injury claim frequencies for sports cars tend to be about average."
[No survivor = no claimant = lower insurance costs?]
These are good sites to consult, in addition to your own agent, to
estimate what insurance costs and/or crash survivability might be
for a particular car in comparison to another under consideration.
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