A thief can rob your car while it sits in your own driveway and never once open the door. They slide underneath, cut for a minute or two, and walk off. The car looks fine until you turn the key and hear a roar like a dirt-track sprint car.
The UK vehicle recovery firm Tracker coined a word for it back in 2023: car cannibalism, where crooks strip pricey parts off a parked car instead of taking the whole vehicle. It is quick, it barely makes noise, and it is a real headache to guard against. Three parts get taken more than anything else.
The Metal Under Your Car Is Worth More Than Gold
The catalytic converter bolts into your exhaust, sits low under the car, and holds three precious metals: platinum, palladium, and rhodium. Only rhodium beats gold, and it beats it badly. Gold trades around $4,700 an ounce and platinum about $1,900, with palladium nearer $1,350, but rhodium sits around $8,550. It spiked past $11,000 in March 2026 before falling back, and every time the price jumps, thefts jump right along with it.
A crook with a battery-powered saw can cut one loose in 60 to 90 seconds. RepairPal figures carried by Consumer Reports put the replacement bill between $2,177 and $2,506, with some jobs topping $3,300, and that is before you count the fuel and electrical lines that get sliced open in the process.
The payout barely makes sense. Carfax puts the thief’s cut at $25 to $300 for a standard converter and up to $1,400 for a hybrid unit, since hybrids pack in more metal, though the crime bureau’s own estimate is lower at $50 to $250 and up to $800. Carfax counted more than 137,000 converters stolen in 2025. The Toyota Prius is law enforcement’s go-to example of a target, and Ford F-Series trucks get hit because their high ground clearance means a thief does not even need a jack.
The whole thing runs in cycles, though the two big trackers count different things and do not agree on the peak. Insurance claims logged by the National Insurance Crime Bureau hit 64,701 in 2022, more than 5,000 a month, then fell to roughly 14,000 in 2024, a 68% drop from 2023 alone. Carfax, which estimates actual thefts rather than claims, puts the peak a year later, in 2023. State Farm alone paid $115.4 million on 45,000 converter claims in 2022, and $11.2 million on more than 3,800 claims in the first half of 2024. Metal prices came back, and the thieves came with them.
Airbags Pop Out in Under a Minute
An NHTSA fact sheet puts airbag theft at around 50,000 a year in the U.S., worth roughly $50 million, though the sheet carries no date and credits only unnamed insurance industry figures. Break a window, reach in, pop the bag, gone. Chicago police have described the job taking as little as 20 seconds.
The reason it is so easy comes down to design. Sair Arapovic, who owns Royce Auto in Chicago, told the Sun-Times that most airbags sit on a spring system. Slide a pry tool into the right spot on the steering wheel and the whole thing just pops out. No cutting, almost no sound.
Hondas and Acuras top the list because they are everywhere and the parts market is huge. A new airbag runs up to $1,000 from a dealer, but shady body shops buy stolen ones for $50 to $200 and drop them into wrecked cars, so a buyer can end up with a stolen bag and never know it. In Detroit in 2022, thieves broke into 18 cars at a single dealership hunting airbags. Montgomery County, Maryland logged more than 90 stolen in the first four months of 2021.
Your Wheels Can Vanish on a Jack
Wheel theft is climbing while whole-car theft falls. Claims frequency was up 4.7% year on year in early 2025, and about 15% since the start of 2023. All it takes is a jack and a wrench, and four wheels are gone in a few minutes. Plenty of newer cars still roll off the lot with no wheel locks at all.
On the claims data, Los Angeles leads, then Oakland and San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, and Miami and Fort Lauderdale, thanks to crowded streets, little off-street parking, and busy markets for stolen parts. Thieves love luxury alloys and big truck wheels most, since those bring the highest resale.
The scale of a full strip job is wild. NHTSA’s own warning is blunter than any statistic: thieves want the parts, and doors, engines and transmissions get stripped out and sold. Your ride can be worth more in pieces than it is as a car.
The Parts You’d Never Think Of
Removable third-row seats from SUVs and minivans get lifted in seconds. They cost a fortune to replace, federal parts-marking rules do not cover seats so there is no VIN stamped on them, and they show up fast on online marketplaces and at salvage yards.
Emblems and badges are a strange one. Thieves pop the logos off Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche and sell them as collector pieces or turn them into counterfeit fashion accessories. That little hood ornament has a whole second life.
Then there is the plain stuff. Headlights and taillights from luxury and newer cars can run hundreds to thousands of dollars, so they get unbolted and sold through side channels. Car batteries come out in minutes and go to scrap yards; one is not worth much, so crews hit a whole block in a single night. Even wing mirrors, wiper blades, brake pads, and grilles get taken.
Anything electronic inside is fair game too. Infotainment screens and aftermarket navigation units resell for thousands. Some thieves carry Bluetooth scanners that sniff out laptops and phones hidden in a locked car, and a garage door opener clipped to the visor can hand a burglar your house. Even the registration in the glovebox is worth stealing, because it comes with your VIN and your address.
Where and Which Cars Get Hit Hardest
Most of this happens in plain sight. The FBI’s incident data puts residential addresses first for vehicle theft, with streets and roads second and parking lots and garages third. Office lots, hotels, and college campuses fill out the rest of the list.
Converter theft in particular is bouncing back city by city. St. Paul, Minnesota nearly tripled in 2025, from 172 reports to 505, though that is still short of the 607 it logged in 2023, and it happened under one of the strictest anti-theft laws in the country. Berkeley, California opened 2026 with nine converter thefts in the first week, against a 2025 average of about five a week.
Some of these crews are organized and bold. In Suffolk County, New York, four men were indicted in April 2026 after allegedly driving a 2021 Maserati Levante around Lindenhurst to cut converters off parked cars. In Beech Grove, Indiana, thieves cut the converters off all 20 district school buses in one night in May 2026, cancelling bus service and leaving a bill near $100,000. They came back in July and did it to the replacements.
California carries the heaviest load. Nearly two thirds of the converter thefts reported to the crime bureau in 2024 happened there, and just ten states accounted for 73% of them between 2022 and 2024. Overall car crime is down, with 659,880 vehicle thefts in 2025, a 23% drop from the year before. Whole cars get stolen less; their parts get stolen more.
Making Your Car a Harder Target
For the converter, a bolt-on steel shield is the best-known fix. It is meant to make the job slow enough that a thief gives up and moves to an easier car, though Consumer Reports and Carfax both say there is little hard data on whether it works. Professional install generally runs a few hundred dollars. Some police departments and insurers will also etch your VIN onto the converter, or you can paint it a bright color so it can be traced later.
Wheels need locking lug nuts or a circular wheel lock, cheap insurance against a very expensive morning. For airbags, a steering wheel bar like The Club blocks access to the driver’s-side bag entirely.
Where you park matters more than people think. Pull the front of the car close to a wall or another vehicle, since so many of the hot parts live up front and under the nose, and park tight enough that the undercarriage is a pain to reach.
A dashcam with parking mode records on impact or movement even with the ignition off, and a motion-triggered floodlight or a video doorbell aimed at the driveway does a lot of quiet work. If parts do get taken, file a police report and call your insurer, since the right coverage may pay for the loss. Reporting even old cars helps push the laws that make stolen parts harder to sell.
