I have heard before that civics are one of the more fequently stolen cars? Granted this was awhile ago and I know the new civic has a lot more saftey features to prevent it. So my question is, is the HCH II a frequently stolen car? It is an easy car to steal? Does an item like a "club" help?

Thanks, James

 

Not sure. I noticed mine has numbered etching on the glass. That plus individually numbered carpool lane stickers. IMO it might be just too much hassle for a thief.

 

I don't think those will be factors down at your local chop shop. They just won't resell your sticker or window.

Sometimes the lists use raw numbers of thefts and other times they use the number of thefts per the number of that type of vehicle registered. When they use the latter, the Civic is much lower.

 

Actually, I think the car is just too new. Older years are high parts demand because the parts never change from year to year, and Honda charges so much for them. That's why chop shops like ripping off the cars. In the HCH2 case, being less than a year old, we're all still under warranty, so chop shops have no incentive to take our parts. Yet.

 

The parts specific to the Hybrid will never be of interest to thieves. The volume is just too low. At 15,000 to 17,000 units per year, there will never be enough of them on the road to justify a high "black market" price for the Hybrid-specific components.

That said, the rest of the car is identical to a standard civic. The standard civic has much higher volumes, and would therefore be of interest to a thief. I guess the best protection from theft would therefore be to dent each of your body panels, making them undesireable!

Maybe not.

 

Civics have been stolen in huge numbers in recent years. The etching goes beyond the glass in many instances by the way. Its on parts as well. The car has a somewhat sophisticated immobilizer relative to previous years FYI. Lots of dealers basically install LoJack on every car that comes in and charge 695 for it unless you balk a bit.

There are more parts than folks realize on the 2006 civics that are num bered for security/theft reasons.



Time will tell though.

 

I was watching a show on car theft once and they said etching VINs in windows was a good deterent because it would cost a thief too much to replace all the windows for it to be worth while... but I think if it's just going to a chop shop it wouldn't make much a difference.

 

Civics, regardless of year, get a bad rap because prior to the 2001-2005 generation, Civics did not have the key-immobilizer feature. Luckily for all HCH owners, the key-immobilizer feature was made standard in 2001 on all Civics. Not to say that this feature can't be defeated (there's almost no defense against a maverick tow truck picking up your car), but its more difficult than it used to be and its better than using a club-type device since you need a vehicle specific key to start the car.If someone can find statistics on pre-2001 Civic and 2001+ Civic thefts, I'd be interested to see how much of an impact the immobilizer had.

 

In the case of the Maverick tow truck, I have the Lojack with early warning system so if it starts moving then I'll know about it within a few minutes. Luckily, Lojack works where I live and where I usually visit out of state, but doesn't work everywhere.

Thanks,
Shawn

 

Why doesn't it work everywhere?