Mayor of Chicago Finally Cracks Down On TikTok-Inspired Car Theft — Sues Kia and Hyundai For Not Making Their Cars Harder For Chicago's Criminals To Steal (with bonus Behind-The-Blog special feature)
Alex Wroblewski. Getty Images.Behind-The-(re)Blog:
A new special feature giving you a rare behind the scenes look at a blogger blogging something that's already been blogged. The first installment is me diving into this follow-up to Gen-Z'ers Pull Off Epic "How To Hotwire" TikTok Trend (AKA "Stealing Cars"), Smash Kia Directly Into Highway Median without searching to see if someone else also dove into it first before I spent a couple hours on it, which would have been best blogging practice and also kept me from looking like a fucking idiot. But now I have to post it since I can't physically bring myself to just dump 1300 words in the trash and not even get a quota credit after blogging about Kia Sportages instead of sleeping. On the very slim bright side at least there is some appreciable irony in a blog about taking something from someone who had it first.
This has been Behind-The-(re)Blog.
The City of Chicago is suing two major automakers amid a growing car theft crisis.Mayor Brandon Johnson announced that the city filed the lawsuit against automakers Kia and Hyundai, alleging that both companies have failed to include "industry-standard engine immobilizers" in several models of vehicles, which resulted in a "steep rise" in crime.
The complaint specifically accuses both companies of failing to equip their U.S. cars sold between 2011 and 2022 with "vital anti-theft technology," stating that both companies "deceptively assured consumers that these vehicles possessed ‘advanced’ safety features."
"The impact of car theft on Chicago residents can be deeply destabilizing, particularly for low- to middle-income workers who have fewer options for getting to work and taking care of their families," Johnson said. "The failure of Kia and Hyundai to install basic auto-theft prevention technology in these models is sheer negligence, and as a result, a citywide and nationwide crime spree around automobile theft has been unfolding right before our eyes." (Fox Business)
Chicago car theft is up 104% since last year. Or if you're a statistical negative nancy, 234% over two years. The politicians, realizing the problem has long since grown out of control, are finally cracking down — and they're not interested in bit players, nabbing a few nobodies and trying to flip them, all that time consuming and expensive police work. They're going straight for the main culprits: the cars themselves.
All I can say is: it's about time.
I can't tell you what a harmful effect Kia and Hyundai have had for my weekly Thieves Anonymous meetings. Practically 3/4 of our group therapy sessions lately have been spent on the resurfacing trauma caused by seeing a nice, bright, shiny Kia Sorento parked in somebody's driveway, or that 2023 Elantra that's always in the mall parking lot — it's hard to take it one day at a time when every one of those days brings you face to face with the cars TikTok taught you how to hotwire. God didn't grant anyone enough serenity to not steal a car with such negligent anti-theft technology. And of course, it's us, the criminals, who suffer the most, as always — our only crime being that we committed crime.
Won't anyone think of the car thieves?
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will. Like his beloved predecessor Lori Lightfoot, Johnson knows that a society is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable among them: criminals, a literally persecuted minority. Nobody is more vulnerable to losing their rights and freedoms, due to arrest, for doing crimes. The secret is to make it impossible for crimes to happen.
Compassionate companies who take their social responsibilities seriously figured this out a long time ago. Take the big chain convenience stores in the city for example — CVS, Duane Reade, Walgreens: each one was thoughtful enough to lock each and every item in their store up behind theft-proof casing, so you can't lay so much as a finger on one single product in the entire place without a certified staff member there to give access and provide supervision. Every time I push that little button and wait 15 minutes for a grumpy employee to walk over and find the correct key on his janitor-ring of 1,500 identical keys to open up the security flap on the tubes of toothpaste, and then repeat the process on the next flap over because he opened the Crest when I actually said Colgate, I think about what a profound level of empathy it took for such a huge company to make a change like this, not out of a sense of profit but a sense of duty — a change for the little guy, like me, who wasn't blessed with things like "the ability to function in a normal society that obeys simple rules and laws and practices the absolute bare minimum of basic morality." I get my toothpaste. And then, five minutes later, I'll think about it all over again while waiting an aisle over for that same employee to come back and do the same thing for the Advil. It takes about an hour and a half to stock one shelf of my medicine cabinet, but I don't steal one thing, because I am not physically able to. Unlike a certain pair of multinational automobile manufacturers, CVS made sure that absolutely 0% of the rules depended on me having even the slightest personal responsibility to follow them.
But of course these places are the exception, not the rule — all across this country, there are stores full of products, streets and neighborhoods full of personal property, so many things that don't belong to you, with the only deterrent against you taking them for yourself being abstract gobbeldy-gook concepts like "right and wrong" and "the law." That's capitalism for you.
Kia and Hyundai have for as long as I can remember been a major part of that problem. Their perfunctory security systems, the alarms that merely irritate the neighbors rather than rattle the foundations of every building in a four-mile radius, the engines that practically start themselves when you rip out the wires and cut and splice and hotwire the ignition — you want to talk about someone's privilege showing? Look no further than these two companies and their failure to deploy military-grade bullet-proof full-body Batmobile shields on their shitty cars when they knew perfectly well that crime was decriminalized in Chicago, and now really the only crime that anyone can actually be punished for committing is…this remains unclear actually, but my best guess is a failure to put better locks on Kias.
And I think I speak for everyone when I say I hope justice is served. Hyundai and Kia have all the injuries of anyone who stole and crashed their cars on their hands, along with a whole lot of relapses of average everyday people who depend on responsible third parties to forcefully physically prevent them from not breaking the law.
As for the future, while this is a huge step in the right direction, there has obviously been a much more pressing crime-related crisis for the City of Chicago — a crisis for which, thanks to this decisive action taken against Kia, Windy City residents may finally be starting to see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel: as soon as Mayor Johnson puts together his best team of lawyers and starts serving lawsuits to dead shooting victims, gang members will start to think lonnnnnnnnngggggg and hard about their sheer negligence in leaving vital organs and body parts exposed for bullets to find and enter.
