Ever on the ball, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has finally announced the most stolen vehicles for the 2009 Model Year! (For those of you without a calendar handy, we're only 56 days away from 2012.)
Topping the list is the 5.2-liter V10 powered 2009 Audi S8. How is it possible that a car that sold only 227 units is the most stolen? Well, because NHTSA bases the study on number of vehicles stolen per 1,000 produced. A total of two Audi S8s were stolen. Pretty sure Tom Brady's crashed more.
The next item on NHTSA's list is the Ford Mustang Shelby GT. 581 were built and five stolen. The rest of the list continues with low-volume cars like the BMW M5, Dodge Charger, Honda S2000, Mitsubishi Galant, Chrysler 300, Infiniti M35/45, Cadillac STS and Mercedes-Benz CL.
Toyota's Camry was the highest real car on the list with 781 units stolen.
Overall, the theft rate fell to 1.33 / 1,000 cars compared with 2008 which saw 1.69 thefts / 1,000 sold.
NHTSA also took the time to point out that the Mercury Mariner was the least stolen vehicle. 25,682 were sold and only two stolen. That's a rate of 0.08 / 1,000.
agentorange says:
11:03 AM, 11/ 4/11
Small wonder politicians love statisitics. You can come up with all kinds of dire looking BS that has no impact in the real world.
DLu says:
12:39 PM, 11/ 4/11
@ agentorange,
I don't know about the "no impact in the real world" statement when it comes to this particular statistic. The S8 is almost 10 times as likely to be stolen than the "average" car (I am rounding up for the S8 to be 1% theft rate). I would think twice if I am about to buy a car that's 10 times more likely to be stolen than your average car. Plus, how many S8s have been beaten up during an unsuccessful theft?
stoppre75 says:
01:58 PM, 11/ 4/11
DLu you obviously don't get the point of this post or agentorange's comment.
There were 10,429,553 cars sold in 2009 in the USA. 227 of them were Audi S8's. Of those 227, two were stolen.
0.000019% of the cars built in 2009 ended up being an Audi S8 that was stolen. Sure sounds like a safe car now.
When you don't have an acceptable base for a statistical comparison you get numbers that skew themselves to extremes and do not give an accurate representation of the true nature of the scenario.
356,824 Toyota Camry's were sold in 2009. To equal the rate of theft of the S8 3,144 Camry's would need to be stolen. Infact the Camry was the Highest reported stolen car with 781 cars taken, but that's just 25% of the Audi's rate of theft (even though only two audi's were stolen)
know the numbers creating the statistics before placing any faith in them.
transpower says:
07:54 PM, 11/ 4/11
See--there are advantages to owning a Mercury Mariner!
bimmerjay says:
09:31 PM, 11/ 4/11
@DLu, there is too small of a sample size to be of any statistical significance in the "real world". Those two S8's could have been stolen from a dealership in one go for all we know. I'm surprised NHTSA wouldn't clean up their data better before publishing something like this.
DLu says:
08:16 AM, 11/ 7/11
@ bimmerjay, yes, the margin of error would be high; I will give you that.
@stoppre75, I cannot believe that you would think a Corolla is just as likely to be stolen as an Escalade... Most of the top theft-rate cars on the list (M5, CL, Shelby GT) are expensive vehicles, just like the S8; that's because thieves target expensive/rare/cool cars.
You can't pick out a single model and divide it by the entire pool of new cars sold in 2009, period. It has no meaning. It's like saying, "Such-and-such neighborhood is not dangerous because the number of people killed there last year was only 0.xx% of the number of people killed in the world last year."
DLu says:
07:20 PM, 11/ 7/11
Too many politicians are idiots who use quasi-statistics (or quote interesting numbers without giving them real context) to manipulate people; they have no idea what the numbers really mean. Statistics help us understand, for example, trends and odds; if a certain set of numbers are inadequate, then somebody needs to come up with a new analysis that makes more sense. Dismissing statistics as having "no real impact in the real world" is, in the least, irresponsible.
If someone cannot come up with better data to help estimate the odds of an Audi S8 being stolen, then he or she needs to ... never mind.