Almost three months ago, Hyundai AND duck has unveiled software designed to thwart an epidemic of theft of their vehicles, caused by a security flaw that has been exposed on TikTok and other social media sites.
So far it hasn’t fixed the problem. Across the country, thieves are still making off in vehicles at an alarming rate.
Data from seven US cities compiled by The Associated Press shows that the number of Hyundai and Kia thefts is still rising despite efforts by companies to fix the glitch, making 8.3 million vehicles relatively easy targets. for thieves.
From Minneapolis, Cleveland and St. Louis to New York, Seattle, Atlanta and Grand Rapids, Michigan, police reported a substantial year-over-year increase in Hyundai and Kia theft reports through April. An eighth city, Denver, that was hit early by the burglary epidemic, reported a 23% decline from 2022 levels, but still experienced a high number of burglaries.
So far this year, Minneapolis police have received 1,899 reports of Kia and Hyundai thefts, nearly 18 times the number for the same period in 2022.
“The scale of the problem is only expanding and is exponentially worse than it has been in the past,” Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara said in an email. “There are some weeks where almost as many Kias and Hyundais are stolen in one week as were previously stolen in a year.”
The most recent nationwide numbers on Hyundai and Kia thefts are not yet publicly available. The figures for the beginning of 2023, such as calculated from the Road Safety Insurance Institute, will be released until the end of this year. (Hyundai and Kia are part of the same South Korean corporate family.)
Some US cities reported that 60% or more of their car theft reports now involve Hyundais or Kias. Videos on TikTok and other sites that demonstrate how to boot and steal Kia and Hyundai models, using just a screwdriver and USB cable, have allowed thefts to spread across the nation since late 2021.
In New York, the Hyundai-Kia theft problem has become so worrisome that the city held a press conference last month to offer owners devices that can track their vehicles if they are stolen. Police reported 966 Hyundai and Kia thefts as of April 30, almost seven times the number in the same period in 2022.
The alarming rate of thefts, which authorities nationwide have linked to other crimes including at least 14 reported accidents and eight deathsit has persisted despite the automakers’ unveiling of their anti-theft software campaign in mid-February.
“GLA is driving our crime,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams, using an acronym for grand larceny of autos. “Kia and Hyundai are leading the GLA.”
Hyundai and Kia said they are accelerating software deployment, with Hyundai saying it’s hitting 6,000 installs per day. The company says it’s using direct mail, phone calls, digital advertising and social media to try and reach interested owners.
Ira Gabriel, a spokesperson for Hyundai, said the company had been trying to remove instructional videos showing how to steal cars from social media.
“But as new ones emerge,” he said, “there have been more waves of thefts.”
Kia said in a statement that it began developing and testing security software last year.
“The process happened at an accelerated pace and allowed us to get started rolling security software advanced earlier this year in phases,” the company said.
Security authorities say the companies’ software rollout has been too slow. Of the 4.5 million Kia vehicles eligible for the fix, the automaker says it has installed the software on about 210,000, nearly 5%. Kia says it has sent notifications to approximately 2.8 million affected owners and expects to have notified all of them by the end of this month.
For Hyundai, the figure is about 225,000 of 3.8 million vehicles, or about 6 percent. Hyundai said it expects to contact all affected vehicle owners by May 18.
The cars affected by the companies, many of them low-cost models from model years 2011 to early 2022, they were not equipped with an anti-theft immobiliser. That device contains a computer chip in the key that needs to be recognized by another chip in the steering column before the engines start.
While most automakers have had the chips for years, Hyundai and Kia have lagged the industry in installing them on many models, thus allowing thieves to exploit the security gap. In the 2015 model year, immobilizers were standard on 96 percent of other manufacturers’ models, but only 26 percent of Hyundai and Kia models, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said.
The automakers’ help drive to install the software should have been prosecuted more aggressively, said Michael Brooks, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Automotive Safety.
Brooks suggested that if the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had he succeeded in recalling the affected vehicles, he would have had a better chance of alerting the owners of the danger and the need to search for a repair.
“Unless people really follow the news,” he said, “they might not know about the theft issues.”
Shakira Ellis, a music instructor from Long Beach, California, is among those who hadn’t heard of the thefts — until she 2019 Hyundai Tucson it was stolen in front of her home at around 4am on April 25th. The car, which contained some of her musical instruments, did not show up.
Ellis, 26, she said Tucson the immobilizer was missing and was not notified of Hyundai’s campaign to distribute the software fix. If she had, Ellis said, she would have immediately taken it in to be fixed. You feel that Hyundai should supply you with one new car to replace it stolen vehicle,
“I feel like I owe compensation,” she said. “It was ruined because it is defective. And people know it. It’s a goal.
Even with a recall, not everyone is affected car at a dealership be fixed. Recall completion rates, Brooks said, average only about 60 percent of owners.
Some of the vehicles, about 15% in Hyundai’s case, cannot be repaired with software. But both Hyundai and Kia say they will pay for the anti-theft devices for those owners.
In Minneapolis and other cities, police say teenagers, some of them too young to have a driver’s license, they exploited the vulnerability. They often crash or are involved in other crimes. Minneapolis Police have logged 209 cases of Hyundais or Kias being involved in fatal crashes and are investigating 169 reports that Kias or Hyundais were used in other crimes.
Multiple cities, including St. Louis, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Seattle, they sued automakers, accusing them of failing to install industry-standard anti-theft devices and unduly burdening city services.
“Kia and Hyundai prioritized profit over people by not installing engine immobilizers in these vehicles,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb said in announcing his city’s lawsuit.
O’Hara, the Minneapolis police chief, said the burglaries were a “public safety crisis” engulfing communities.
“Minors ride around in these stolen models and when caught by police, she said, they are rarely held accountable for their behavior” by juvenile courts and corrections systems.
This can lead to more serious crimes, he said, “until they are very seriously injured or commit suicide.”
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Associated Press news researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report from New York.
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