The car that got stolen twice

A woman in Grand Rapids, whose name was in the local news, but I’ll leave it out, had her Kia Sportage stolen from the Woodland Mall parking. Cops found it a few days later. It was sitting at a crime scene across town. She had it towed to a body shop. A week later, she calls to check on repairs. Shop tells her the car isn’t there. Stolen again, right off their lot. Some kids put 960 miles on it before anyone noticed. Smoked in it. Trashed the interior. Same car, same flaw, twice in one month.

She sold it after that. I don’t blame her.

This is what happens when a car manufacturer skips a 50 dollar part, and 8.3 million vehicles end up with no engine immobilizer. That’s the part that checks whether the key in the ignition is the right one. Pop off the plastic cover on the steering column, jam a USB cable into the ignition slot, twist. The car starts. Twenty five seconds, maybe less if you’ve done it before. TikTok made this famous in 2022.

Insurance claims on Kia and Hyundai thefts went up over 1000 percent between 2020 and 2023. Back in early 2020, maybe 1 in 1000 insured Kias got stolen. Normal rate. By early 2023, that number was 11.2 per 1000. Every other brand stayed flat. But by 2024, Kia and Hyundai were the first, second, and fifth most stolen vehicles in the country. A decade of skipping engine immobilizers will do that.

The affected models are mostly 2011 to 2021 Kias and 2015 to 2021 Hyundais with turn key ignition. Not the push button start versions. Those have immobilizers. But if your car has a physical key you stick into the steering column, and it’s from those years, there’s a decent chance it can be started with a USB cable. Milwaukee saw 895 Kias and Hyundais stolen in 2020. The next year, that number hit 6970. A 679 percent increase in one city.

The insurance industry eventually started refusing to cover these cars in some markets. Just flat out said no, we won’t insure your Kia Sportage in this zip code. I’ve never seen that before with a mainstream vehicle. Usually, that kind of blacklisting is reserved for exotic cars or vehicles with salvage titles.

In 2023, Kia and Hyundai finally put out a software patch. The patch basically makes the car require the key to be in the ignition for the entire time the car is running. If you pull the key out, the engine shuts off. Seems obvious, but that’s the fix. Steering wheel locks went out free to anyone who asked. Later came the zinc sleeve, a metal reinforcement around the ignition cylinder.

Fewer than half of these cars have been fixed, though. In late 2024, the number sat around 50 percent. The rest of them are still out there, vulnerable. Same flaw that got that Sportage stolen twice.

I talked to a guy in Washington state. His 2013 Hyundai got targeted twice in six months. First time was January, the second time was June. By the second attempt, he had the software patch installed and a steering wheel lock on. They still broke his back window and damaged the steering column. Patch worked, car didn’t start, but he was still out a window and a body shop visit. Now he’s got a webcam in his apartment recording his parking spot every night. That’s where we are now. People are running surveillance on their own cars because the manufacturer couldn’t be bothered to include a part that’s been standard in the industry since the late 1990s.

It started in Milwaukee. Kids stealing cars, doing donuts in intersections, crashing them, posting the videos. The Kia Boys hashtag pulled 33 million views before TikTok finally removed it. Too late by then. The how to video went live on July 12, 2022, and stayed up for two weeks. Plenty of time.

At least 8 people have died. Fourteen crashes, all connected to the Kia Challenge. Four teenagers died in Buffalo when they crashed a stolen Sportage in October 2022. In April 2024, four more teens were in a fatal crash in Illinois after stealing a Hyundai Elantra. The 16 year old driver hit a tree. He died, and the other three passengers were badly hurt. These aren’t professional car thieves. These are kids who watched a video and decided to go for a joyride.

The legal fallout has been massive. A $200 million class action settlement in 2023. Another $145 million settlement in 2024 that’s currently stuck in appeals. And just last month, 35 state attorneys general announced a $9 million multistate settlement. Totaled car? Maybe 4500 dollars. Partial loss gets you 2250. Break in with no theft? 375. But you only qualify if the theft happened after April 29, 2025, and before you got the zinc sleeve installed. Whichever hits first. Good luck keeping track of all that.

The whole situation makes me wonder what other cost cutting decisions are hiding in the vehicles we buy every day. Kia and Hyundai saved maybe 50 bucks per car by not including the immobilizer. Multiply that by millions of vehicles, and it’s real money. Then came the bill. Hundreds of millions on settlements, patches, steering wheel locks, zinc sleeves. And they have to be the brand that teenagers steal for fun. Insurance companies in some zip codes just stopped writing policies. Resale values tanked, 10 to 30 percent depending on the model. If you’re buying a used Kia or Hyundai from those years, run the VIN through carVertical first. A lot of these cars got stolen, and ended up back on the market with damage you can’t always see.

The woman in Grand Rapids quit her job on 28th Street. Said she used to drive up there without a second thought, and now she’s always looking over her shoulder. I get it. Your car gets stolen by a kid with a USB cable, then stolen again from the shop where it’s being fixed. At that point, something’s broken beyond the car. You were promised that if you locked the doors, it would still be there. Turns out that promise was worth about 50 bucks to them.

The Kia Boys are still active. Police in multiple cities have reported a recent uptick in thefts, mostly targeting cars that never got the software patch. In smaller towns, especially, where owners might not have heard about the vulnerability or didn’t bother driving to the dealership. Just last month, cops in one Missouri town responded to a stolen Kia call and spotted two other stolen Kias speeding away from the same neighborhood. While they were dealing with that, they got a call about another attempted theft. Also a Kia.

The patch works, apparently. Cars that got the software update see theft rates drop significantly. But you can’t force people to bring their cars in, and you can’t make them care about a problem until it happens to them. Millions of vulnerable cars are still on the road. The videos are still out there. Every few weeks, somebody’s Kia disappears from their driveway, and it makes the local news.

The woman with the Sportage sold hers and moved on. I don’t know what she drives now, but I doubt it’s a Kia.