If she had, Ellis said, she would have immediately taken it in to be fixed. The car, which contained some of her musical instruments, hasn’t turned up.Įllis, 26, said her Tucson lacked the immobilizer, and she hadn’t been informed of Hyundai’s campaign to distribute the software fix. Shakira Ellis, a music instructor from Long Beach, California, is among those who hadn’t heard about the thefts - until her 2019 Hyundai Tucson was stolen in front of her home around 4 a.m. “Unless people are really following the news,” he said, “they might not know about theft issues.” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had managed a recall of the affected vehicles, it would have stood a better chance of alerting owners to the danger and need to seek a repair. The automakers’ service campaign to install the software should have been more aggressively pursued, said Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety.īrooks suggested that if the U.S. In the 2015 model year, immobilizers were standard on 96% of other manufacturers’ models but on only 26% of Hyundai and Kia models, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said. Though most automakers have had the chips for years, Hyundai and Kia have lagged behind the industry as a whole in installing them on many models, thereby allowing thieves to exploit the security gap. Such a device contains a computer chip in the key that must be recognized by another chip in the steering column before the engines will start.
The companies’ affected cars, many of them lower-cost models from the 2011 to early 2022 model years, were not equipped with a theft immobilizer. Hyundai said he expects to have contacted all the affected vehicle owners by May 18. Videos on TikTok and other sites that illustrate how to start and steal Kia and Hyundai models - using only a screwdriver and a USB cable - have allowed the thefts to spread across the nation since late 2021.įor Hyundai, the figure is about 225,000 out of 3.8 million vehicles - roughly 6%. cities have reported that 60% or more of their auto theft reports now involve Hyundais or Kias. (Hyundai and Kia are part of the same South Korean corporate family.) The figures for early 2023, as calculated by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, will be released until later this year. The most recent nationwide numbers on Hyundai and Kia thefts aren’t yet publicly available. “We have some weeks where nearly as many Kias and Hyundais are stolen in a week as had previously been stolen in a year.”
“The scope of the problem is only expanding and is exponentially worse than it has been in the past,” Brian O’Hara, the police chief of Minneapolis, said in an email. So far this year, Minneapolis police have received 1,899 Kia and Hyundai theft reports, nearly 18 times the number for the same period in 2022.
0 kommentar(er)
