Jew World Order

Sonja Jordan loved her 2017 Kia Soul. She knows it’s a cliché, but she called the Soul her “first adult purchase.” It was the car she drove to every job she’s ever had, the first place she held her cat Betty after she found her, and it was the car she drove across the country when she moved from New York state to Tacoma, Washington a few months ago. It was dependable and solid, fun to drive, and easy to maintain. She wanted to drive it until the wheels fell off.

Jordan, a 26-year-old who works for a non-profit, had heard that some Kias like her Soul were apparently easy to steal. But she lived in gated apartment complexes before moving to Tacoma, so hadn’t thought much more of it. In Tacoma, Jordan and her husband rented a house. Less than two months after moving in, on July 16, the Soul was gone—stolen from outside their new home.

Jordan’s Kia was one of 642 vehicle thefts in Pierce County that month. Auto thefts have spiked in Washington state over the last two years, according to the Puget Sound Auto Theft Task Force, reflecting a nationwide trend fueled almost entirely by a design decision in Kia and Hyundai vehicles that make them easy to steal, exacerbated by a Tiktok and Instagram subculture dubbed “Kia Boys” dedicated to showing off stolen vehicles. Some nine million Kias and Hyundais manufactured from 2011 to 2021 were made without engine immobilizers, a basic anti-theft device that is legally mandated in Canada and Europe. Stealing those cars requires only a screwdriver, a USB cord, and about 30 to 60 seconds. Stealing Kias and Hyundais has thus become a form of sport, primarily among teens, who show off their thefts on TikTok and Instagram under burner accounts. Some thieves also use the stolen vehicles to commit other crimes in a vehicle that cannot be traced to them.

The thefts are a problem for cities and their police departments, which are suddenly dealing with an exponential increase in car thefts, each one of which in theory needs to be tracked and investigated. They’re a problem for Kia and Hyundai dealerships unable to keep up with the surge of cars in need of repair and stocking all the parts that often need to be replaced when a steering column is ripped apart. They’re a problem for insurance companies paying for these repairs, who are passing off the costs to owners in the form of higher premiums.

But most of all they’re a problem for people like Jordan, who bought their cars before the Kia theft trend started and were unaware that they lacked a key anti-theft device most every other car has. Now, each one of them is stuck with a sitting duck.

With the issue so widespread and well-documented, the resale value of their cars have tanked, insurance premiums are skyrocketing if the companies will insure them at all, and, coincidentally, interest rates have risen dramatically in recent years, making a new car loan that much more expensive. So all they can do is wait and hope.

"Kia is basically telling its customers that they are on their own,” said Paul Laier, whose 2021 Kia Forte has been stolen once and was then broken into 10 days after he got it back. “I don't think they are taking the accountability that they should be.”

Vehicle thefts in 2022 were up 25 percent nationwide compared to 2019, according to estimates from the National Insurance Crime Bureau. The NICB estimates more than one million cars were stolen nationwide in 2022, which hasn’t happened since 2008, due largely to the widespread adoption of anti-theft devices by every other manufacturer. To gain a more complete picture of the theft problem nationwide, Motherboard has filed public records requests with more than 100 cities and counties across the U.S. for detailed Kia/Hyundai theft data. As of publication, we have obtained data from 22 of those cities, virtually all of which have shown some degree of surge in Kia and Hyundai thefts. The surges differ in severity and intensity, but even places like Plano, Texas, which experienced between zero and two stolen Kias and Hyundais per month before this year, had 36 stolen in July.  Chicago, Atlanta, Portland, and Denver have also provided data to Motherboard which demonstrates the surge in stolen vehicles fueled by the Kia/Hyundai theft trend.

To better understand the impact this surge in Kia and Hyundai thefts is having, Motherboard spoke to six Kia and Hyundai owners who recently had their cars stolen. Most of them have had their cars stolen or broken into multiple times and have experienced profound frustration at some aspect of the stolen-car economy, whether it’s the dealership that took forever to do the repair, the insurance company that made the ordeal a bureaucratic hassle, or the police department that didn’t investigate the crimes even as they kept happening.

But they’re mostly mad at Kia and Hyundai for making the cars a target. Most of them are out thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs after the ordeals and, above all else, feel traumatized by the repeated thefts and break-ins and powerless to stop it from happening again.

“Imagine somebody broke into your home and slept in your bed for nights on end and absolutely just ruined your bed,” Jordan said. “But your bed costs thousands of dollars and your bed is your one way to be able to go out and participate in society. And then you are left to pick up all of the mess around. It's a very violating feeling.”

***

In 2021, Paul Laier, a 35-year-old associate producer in the TV industry living in Los Angeles, got a great deal on his Forte. At $18,000 with zero interest, it was the first new car he ever bought. Laier was “instantly in love with it,” he told Motherboard.

On July 23, Laier got home around 11 p.m. and street-parked his car outside like he always does. Around 5 a.m., he woke to banging on his door. It was the police. They asked him if he was Paul Laier and if he drove a Kia Forte. Bleary-eyed, he said yes. “OK,” Laier recalled them saying, “We found it.”

This was how Laier learned that some kids had stolen his car, gone for a joyride, and abandoned it in an alley a few miles from his house, all while he was sleeping. The thieves made such a racket crashing the car into everything they could in the alley that a resident called the cops, who then found the abandoned car.

Laier’s insurance policy covered a rental car for 30 days, but it ended up taking the body shop longer than that to fix the car because of various bureaucratic delays between the shop and the insurance company. As soon as he got the car back, he took it to the Kia dealership to get the software update Kia released in February, which it says will prevent the cars from being stolen by killing the engine if anyone attempts to start it without the key.

But, as Laier found out, the software update only prevents someone from driving off with the car, not from breaking into it and ripping apart the steering column and ignition. And there isn’t much to distinguish a car that has gotten the software update from one that hasn’t. Kia puts a decal on the driver-side front window, but it is small and transparent, so it is difficult to see at night. Also, most thieves break a rear window to avoid setting off the car alarm—which is only triggered by breaking a front window—and therefore might not look at the driver window at all.

The anti-theft decal Kia dealers put on cars that have received the software update. Photo credit: Jeff Mayfield

As a result, 10 days after he got his car back, Laier’s Forte was broken into again. This time, they were unable to steal the car due to the software update, but they still smashed the window, gutted the steering wheel column, and ripped out the ignition as part of the theft process, rendering the car undrivable. The police refused to log it as attempted theft, instead classifying it as vandalism, which meant Laier’s insurance company wouldn’t cover a rental car. So he went another two weeks without his car. In total, he spent about $3,000 out of pocket for the two incidents.

Kia spokesperson James Bell told Motherboard the company is “confident” that the software upgrade “further enhances the vehicle’s security once it is installed” but did not otherwise answer specific questions about the decal’s design or other possible methods Kia could use to mark cars that have received the upgrade. Bell also said the company has distributed more than 280,000 steering wheel locks as part of its program, which customers can either get from a local police station or directly from Kia’s website for free.

Laier’s wife wants him to ditch the car and get a new one, but they still have $9,000 to pay off on the loan and, with interest rates much higher than they were in 2021, it would cost too much on balance to trade it in and get a new car at higher rates. So, in addition to getting a steering wheel lock, he’s thinking about removing the Kia medallion and getting a car cover to put on it every night so people can’t see it’s a Kia.

***

Jacob Abernathy bought his 2019 Kia Soul in February of 2020, just before the pandemic hit. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a D.C. suburb, in a townhouse-style apartment with his wife, where they street-park their one car. In the spring, they got a notice from Kia about the theft issue informing them they could get a steering wheel lock for free from the local police department. Abernathy said he “took it seriously” but hadn’t heard anything about the thefts being an issue in Silver Spring, so the notice “just went on my pile of things to do.”

On June 27, his wife left the house to go to work and the car was gone. The D.C. police found it a few days later.

For Abernathy, dealing with Geico, his insurance company, was the biggest headache of the ordeal. At first, Geico claimed there was only $463 in damage—“suspiciously close” to his $500 deductible, Abernathy said. So he went to the shop to inspect the car himself and saw “there was a lot of body and bumper damage,” none of which had been noted by the claims adjuster. Abernathy then had to navigate a complicated, highly bureaucratic process of having the body shop do their own assessment and then having that adjudicated by Geico. In the end, the revised estimate was for more than $3,000 in damages. Geico did not respond to a Motherboard request for comment.

Abernathy’s car was also broken into a second time while at the shop, so he had to file a second claim for that broken window, too. He ended up getting the car back two months after it was stolen and having spent $2,000, which he said was “so annoying,” because he only had $3,000 left to pay off. Instead, he had to go deeper into credit card debt to get his car back so he can wait for it to be broken into again.

“My wife was convinced we had to move after it happened the second time,” Abernathy said, “but just going on Reddit or other social media, it’s like, there’s going to be people everywhere. The best thing that you can do is, like, hope people stop doing it.” He wishes whoever stole the car had totalled it.

***

When Brelea Smith wakes up every morning in her home in Bakersfield, California, the first thing she does is look out the window and see if her 2020 Kia Sportage is still there.

“It’s something I’m always going to be worried about,” she told Motherboard. “I can’t imagine, just, like, forgetting about it.”

Smith’s Sportage was stolen for the first time in 2021 by a man who, she said, first offered to rake her leaves and then later made off with the car using the same technique as is popular with Kias, even though the nature of the theft didn’t fit the description of the typical Kia Boys joyride. The car was found in Long Beach, California and she was just barely able to get her key in the ignition to drive it home.

The second time her car was stolen was on February 6. She was without the car for two and a half months, which the police eventually found less than a mile from her house. Everything was still inside, including the car seat and a pair of expensive sunglasses. Two days after she got the car back, someone tried to steal it again. They smashed the window but the alarm went off which scared them away.

Even though she bought a steering wheel lock, Smith thinks there’s “nothing I can do to stop this from happening.” But she can’t afford to trade it in because interest rates are so high. She feels like she’s stuck with the car, even though she told Motherboard that “it’s so violating just to know that someone was in my space that I take my daughter around in and who knows what they did in there.”

Bell, the Kia spokesperson, said the company “continues to take comprehensive action to support our customers in response to this situation that has been created by criminals using methods of theft promoted and popularized on social media to steal or attempt to steal certain vehicle models.” He added that Kia now gives “top priority” to people whose cars had been damaged by theft or attempted theft when distributing parts and have “increased our ordering above demand to drive a sufficient parts supply” to help with the parts backlog.

But that’s not the message Smith got when she asked the Kia dealership what they will do if her car is broken into and damaged so it can’t be driven again. According to her, they said there’s nothing they can do.

“What do you mean you can’t do anything about it?” Smith asks now. “You made these shitty cars.”

***

Despite the toll rampant thefts are having on car owners nationwide, the affected models have not been recalled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a federal agency under the Department of Transportation, because the car technically complies with federal regulations. A recall would not necessarily require Kia and Hyundai to install immobilizers; for example, they could issue a recall so affected vehicles get the software update. It is especially puzzling in comparison to some other vehicles that actually did get a recall, such as the 2019 Volkswagen Jetta, which was recalled by NHTSA because the car doesn’t beep when the key is left in the ignition.

Kia and Hyundai are facing several lawsuits over the immobilizer issue. One, a class action lawsuit for affected customers, has reached a tentative agreement that would compensate affected owners up to $6,125 if the car was deemed a total loss after being stolen, or $3,375 if it was damaged, plus $375 for insurance expenses. That settlement has yet to be approved by a judge.

A separate lawsuit involves 17 cities that have sued Kia and Hyundai under public nuisance laws due to the burden the theft issue has placed on local police departments. It is a similar approach cities have used to sue opioid manufacturers and the vaping company Juul.

Jordan suspects her Kia was initially stolen as part of the Kia Boys trend, because her security camera caught another Hyundai pull up to the car and then both vehicles drove away a few minutes later. It may have been abandoned or sold afterwards. She didn’t get any news on it for weeks.

Still, the day her car was stolen, she knew she would never feel safe leaving it anywhere again, so they went out and bought a different car. She went with a Mini Cooper; she says she won’t be buying another Kia any time soon. But for weeks afterwards, she still looked for her old car wherever she went, keeping an eye out just in case she saw it.

Jordan didn’t have comprehensive insurance that covered theft, a decision that at least meant she didn’t have to go through the insurance process others found so difficult. It provided a cleaner break that others wished they could have for a line of cars that are causing them constant stress.

Two months after it was stolen, Jordan’s Soul was found in a church parking lot without any tires, the inside gutted, the center console ripped out, the dashboard mutilated, and the inside covered in filth, crack pipes, and garbage. Jordan paid the tow yard a $500 flat fee to take the car and title off her hands. Combined with the $3,800 she still had to pay off on the car, she’s out about $4,500. She knows she’s fortunate to be in a financial situation where she could afford to bail on the Soul, but the ordeal still pains her.

The car she had so many memories in, she said, “wasn’t even a car anymore.”

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