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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: Maggie Newman <jole@gsb.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Air Bag Theft: It Happens
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 17:15:38 GMT

Is it easy to steal an airbag? Yeah, first you disconnect the battery for three minutes, then you unscrew four bolts. It's harder to get the passenger's side airbag. You can't pop the bag, because it's no good after that.

Is it *common* to steal an air bag?

The Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) in Arlington, VA, tracks theft claims from a base of major U.S. insurance companies. According to them, 5% of all theft (from auto) claims are for an air bag. Kim Hazelbaker, Senior Vice President of HLDI, remarks, "we see thefts of air bags as being the stereos of the 1990s." He also likens it to the growing trend of stealing the engine control module ("black box" or computer) from vehicles.

According to John Werner of State Farm Insurance's Research Department in Bloomington, IL, vehicle thefts are declining as a whole (the rate dropped 22.7% between 1991 and 1994) for a variety of reasons, but airbag theft rates are up. State Farm estimates that at the end of 1992 4.2 cars _out of every 10,000 airbag-equipped, comprehensively insured_ stolen vehicles had an airbag stolen; by December 1994, this number had risen to 7.5.

This is not a large number. But the insurance industry, which likes to crunch numbers and spot trends (and raise rates), noted that there is a significant increase in the _rate_ of theft and, projecting that the percentage of cars with an airbag (about 29% now) will rise past 90% during the next 20 years, being issuing projections about the future:

State Farm again: "...industry losses will be between $60 and $120 million per year when all cars are equipped with airbags. This amounts to a $.40 increase in insurance premium per year on each policy that provides theft coverage."

The Guardian Home Page of April 8, 1994 turned this into:

"The United States, the research and development factory for crime, has come up with a theft more improbable than sneaker muggings. Police and insurers say thieves who once contented themselves with car stereos and hubcaps now go for inflatable safety bags fitted to every new car sold in America."

CNN reported the story on July 6, 1995 in their "Moneyline" segment. Reporter Alan Dodds Frank quotes a dealership and a safety engineer from Morton Automotive, the leading manufacturer of airbags, saying that airbag theft is a "lucrative sideline" for thieves.

NPR also reported the story, quoting a local police officer with a hyperbolic description of the dangers of a popped airbag. (Remember, a popped airbag is of no use to a thief.)

So far the incidence of airbag theft is uneven. Officer LaPrairie of Chicago's Area 4 Property Crimes Unit, which specializes in theft from autos, says he has never seen a report of an airbag theft, either from a dealership or an individual. But his counterpart in Detroit describes it as "an everyday occurrence," though not as common as stereo theft. Hazelbaker of the HLDI reports that it is particularly rampant in the northeast U.S. and in cities generally as opposed to small towns and rural areas.

There have been three incidents of large-scale airbag theft from dealerships. The Hartford Courant reported on February 16 and February 27, 1995 that at least 7 local dealerships had been broken into, seemingly for the sole purpose of stealing airbags. The owner of Scardsdale (NY) Ford related during the July CNN Moneyline story that his dealership had been robbed. And Hazelbaker of the HLDI told me that there had been a rash of dealership breakins in central Florida. Perhaps we will see more of these in the future. At present they seem widely scattered; I have been unable to confirm any other dealership robberies.

The bottom line is that an airbag is an expensive, stealable piece of equipment in your car. If your car is stolen and stripped, there is a chance they will steal your airbag too, just as they will steal your car's computer and stereo. The rate of airbag theft is small but growing as the number of cars equipped with airbags grows. As has been discussed in earlier threads, the market for stolen airbags is almost exclusively dealerships and sidewalk mechanics who replace damaged or deployed airbags with "hot" bags instead of the factory-fresh new bags they bill the insurer for, pocketing the difference. Insurance companies are thinking about ways to subvert this incipient black market, including making them more difficult to remove and identifying them with traceable serial numbers.

Airbags seem to lend themselves to ULS more so than other car components, perhaps because they are new. People once thought the powder they are packed in was a toxic chemical that could cause skin burns or lung damage when the bag deployed. A technician at Pontiac/GN told me that in an in-house publication, Pontiac warned front-end techs that "urban youths" were stealing airbags to gain access to the canister of propellant gas contained in the module. For what purpose? Bombs or inhalants, he conjectured. This one is almost certainly false and has the makings of a genuine UL.

Maggie "more than you EVER wanted to know..." Newman