Theft Prevention is a Safety Feature

Last week I got nerd-sniped by a Hacker News link to an IIHS post on death rates by vehicle model. The IIHS report, from 2023, featured a table ranking cars by their rate of ‘other-driver deaths’, or how often a specific model kills the driver of a vehicle they crash into.

Mixed in with the usual giant trucks were a smattering of tiny Kias:

IIHS reported other-driver death rates

The size difference between these cars is massive – a Kia Rio is less than half the unladen weight of a Ram 2500 Crew Cab, nearly 2 tons lighter! How are these compact cars killing others at a similar rate to our largest trucks?

To dig in, I grabbed the IIHS data and the weights of each model and plotted them:

Data Source: IIHS, Auto Evolution

Deaths per million registered vehicle years, 2020 & equivalent earlier models, 2018-21. Bubble size represents curb weight.

With the data visualized, three key narratives emerged:

  1. Big trucks kill others. The blue points above show large trucks are much more likely to kill the passengers in the cars they hit while keeping their occupants relatively safe. Size is the dominant factor here, with smaller trucks producing figures in line with overall averages.
  2. Dodge Chargers are a unique danger to their drivers and others: The headline of the original IIHS piece is a bit misleading. “American muscle cars with high horsepower and a hot rod image rank among the deadliest vehicles on the road,” should perhaps have been written to focus on the Dodge Charger specifically (and, arguably, the Dodge Challenger). Mustangs and Cameros both rank in the top-20 for driver deaths, but neither rank for other-driver deaths. Chargers are unique outliers as a threat to themselves and others.
  3. Kias break the rules. They’re not big, they’re not fast, but the tiny Optima, Ria, and Forte cluster alongside the Chargers. The Rio and Forte rank in the top 20 for driver and other-driver death rates – with the Optima ranking 21st and 5th for driver and other-driver deaths, respectively.

The issue here isn’t the structural safety of the car. The 2020 Kia Optima has a 5-star crash rating for every metric measured by the NHTSA, matching the similarly classed Honda Accord and Camry.

No, the issue here is how easy it is to steal Kias, thanks to the company’s omission of immobilizers in models manufactured between 2011 and 2021.

Immobilizers are security devices that prevent a car from starting without a transponder or smart key. A 2016 study found that immobilisers, “lowered the overall rate of car theft by about 40% between 1995 and 2008.”

But then Kia left them out:

Aaron Gordon, writing for Vice in 2023, spelling out the impact in Chicago:

The scale of the Kia and Hyundai theft problem is astounding. In Chicago, during the “old normal” days prior to the summer of 2022, six to eight percent of all stolen cars were Kias or Hyundais, according to data obtained by Motherboard. This was in line with how many Kias and Hyundais were on Chicago’s roads, according to the lawsuit Chicago filed against Kia and Hyundai. Then, in June 2022, the percentage of stolen cars that were Kias and Hyundais edged up to 11 percent. In July, it more than doubled to 25 percent. By November, it had almost doubled again, to 48 percent. Through August 2023, the most recent month for which Motherboard has data, 35 percent of the 19,448 stolen cars in Chicago have been Kias or Hyundais.

The red line in the chart above is Milwaukee, MN, where bored kids first discovered the cars could be stolen with a screwdriver and USB cable. Eventually, they started posting their joyrides to TikTok, YouTube, and Snap. Right around May 2022 – when Tommy G posted his viral documentary about “Kia Boys” on YouTube – the phenomenon bubbled up above the local Milwaukee subculture and spread to other markets.

A software update shipped in 2023 cut theft rates by more than half – among those cars that had the update applied. My city’s police department even mailed letters to local Kia owners, encouraging them to take action:

The Alameda Police Department's letter to Kia and Hyundai owners

By July 2024, Kia reported ~60% of eligible vehicles had been addressed.

So when is a minicar as dangerous as a 3-ton truck? When it’s easy to steal. Kia’s omission of immobilizers was a poor design choice with unexpected, catastrophic, downstream effects. We can see the story clearly in the data: from crash tests scores to theft rates and, ultimately, fatality figures.

Hyundai and Kia have already settled a national class action lawsuit for $200 million, but new suits filed by cities continue to roll in.