New data paints a worrying picture of the country’s car theft landscape, with AA insurance showing a 25 percent rise in car theft according to the latest figures. The most popular stolen vehicle brand is Land Rover, with statistics from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) revealing one in every hundred Land Rovers were stolen in the year ending March 2023, with criminals becoming increasingly smart and finding new methods to get into vehicles.
READ MORE: ‘Worrying’ rise in vehicle theft as ‘miscreants’ use high-tech methods
Data obtained through the Freedom of Information requests by Confused.com indicated Land Rovers were three times more likely to be stolen than the second most popular target for thieves, the Mercedes-Benz.
Among the 896,948 licensed Land Rovers in the UK, 8,284 were reported as stolen during the period, which equates to 924 thefts for every 100,000.
Six of the top 10 most stolen models are made by Land Rover, with the Range Rover Velar R-Dyn found to be the most targeted, with two in every hundred of the model, ending up stolen.
Data revealed on The National News website, showed Mercedes Benz, had a theft rate of 323 cars stolen per 100,000. Ford, in third place, showed 292 cars were stolen per 100,000. The theft rate for the brand BMW revealed 290 were cars stolen per 100,000.
In fifth place, the brand Audi had a theft rate of 216 per 100,000. Toyota, Fiat, Volkswagen, Vauxhall and Hyundai were the remaining brands in the top 10 list of most stolen cars in the country.
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The data also revealed that black cars are most likely to disappear from the roads as a total of 18,000 black cars were stolen last year.
The West Midlands saw the most car thefts across the country, with 251 out of every 100,000 cars taken, whereas the county Dyfed in Wales had the lowest car theft rate at 22 per 100,000 vehicles.
This comes as a new analysis from AA Insurance shows the number of cars stolen last year has increased by 25 percent. 130,389 cars had been stolen in 2022, up from 104,435 in 2021.
As reported in The Telegraph, Gus Park, managing director for AA Insurance Services said: “The rise in vehicle and residential thefts are worrying for everyone and highlights that security of both car and home are vitally important. We urge police chiefs and crime commissioners across the country to create an action plan to crack the case.”
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The insurance company is advising drivers to not leave valuables in cars and to use wheel locks so thieves are warned.
Criminals are becoming more sophisticated in the way they steal through the use of hi-tech methods to breach security. This can include key cloning, where transmitters can intercept signals from cars.
The rise in thefts was matched by an increase in the number of people that had seen possessions stolen from their cars, with 212,900 items stolen in 2022, compared to 193,647 stolen in 2021.
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