Thieves target your car’s air bag
50,000 are stolen annually, data show
Natalie Aviña-Lopez was visiting Disneyland in July when she got an alarming text from her mother.
Someone had broken into AviñaLopez’s 2017 Honda Civic, which was parked in the driveway of her Los Angeles-area home in Montclair, California.
But unlike the past, when a perpetrator might have swiped the car radio, the thief stole something much more valuable: the driver-side air bag.
The repairs and replacement parts cost Aviña-Lopez $2,000, including her $500 insurance deductible.
“My first reaction was shock,” the Citrus College student said. “Like, what the hell? Why do they need an air bag?”
She’s not alone. Criminals throughout the country are stealing air bags out of relatively new Honda cars for apparent resale to questionable repair shops or unsuspecting online customers, according to police records and USA TODAY research.
Law enforcement authorities in several major markets, including Miami, New York City and the Washington, D.C., area, have noticed a flurry of thefts.
The pattern is difficult to quantify because the intensely local nature of component theft investigations means no national data are available. The FBI and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say they don’t track air bag thefts.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau estimates that about 50,000 air bags are stolen annually. But the group is not actually tracking the numbers to spot trends such as why recent-model Hondas might be at higher risk.
In general, though, air bags are a lucrative target for thieves. They’re expensive – with prices sometimes topping $1,000 – and easy to portray as legitimate.
Criminals typically gain entry to a vehicle parked in an open lot, cut open the steering wheel and extract the device. Other air bags in the vehicle are rarely targeted, possibly because they’re less likely to deploy and thus less likely to be in need of replacement.
“Because of their portability, air bags can be easily removed and installed as ‘new’ by unscrupulous collision repair shops,” the National Insurance Crime Bureau says.
“These dishonest operators will then charge the vehicle owner or their insurer the full price for the replacement, thus committing insurance fraud.”
Why a spike? And why Honda? Authorities aren’t sure.
But a spate of air bag recalls in recent years – including the largest in U.S. history, which required auto suppliers to scramble to make the new parts – may have increased demand for replacements.
“They are in short supply because of all the recalls they have on them,” said Roger Morris, chief communications officer for the National Insurance Crime Bureau.
Where it’s happening
Florida is a hot spot for air bag theft. In Miami-Dade County alone, thieves stole 875 air bags in 2017, up from 38 in
2013, according to police records obtained by USA TODAY through the Freedom of Information Act.
❚ Northern Virginia: Several com- munities in the Washington, D.C., area have been hit with air bag theft in recent months, including Arlington, Alexandria and Herndon.
❚ New York City: Thieves have stolen more than 409 air bags from vehicles in New York since the start of 2017, according to figures provided by the New York Police Department. (Figures from the last four months of 2017 were not available.)
❚ Florida: It’s not just Miami-Dade. Other areas of southern and central Florida have been targeted, as well, including Osceola County and Broward County.
Why Honda?
It’s not clear why Hondas are being targeted.
Honda spokesman Chris Martin said the company doesn’t track component theft figures.
“There’s no way for us to really know because owners don’t report to us when parts have been stolen,” he said. “But we are certainly not unaware of the fact that Hondas have been a target of parts theft for many years simply based on the popularity of models in this market.”
Which raises an obvious question for auto industry experts: Could there be a connection to the ongoing Takata air bag recall, which involves about 37 million U.S. vehicles, including most other automakers? Have criminals figured out how to capitalize financially on the Takata scandal?
Of all the automakers affected by the Takata air bags, Honda had the most.
Nearly 12 million Honda vehicles in the U.S., including some of the automaker’s luxury Acura models, were subject to recalls to replace the defective air bags. The defective parts were prone to exploding upon deployment, especially after years spent in hot, humid weather.
But of the individual episodes of air bag theft reviewed by USA TODAY, none of the Honda vehicles targeted was subject to the Takata recall.
All were newer models.
Costly repairs
What’s certain is that the financial incentive for thieves is significant. The average air bag on a 2017 Honda Accord, for example, cost about $989, according to Honda.
Black market air bags are generally sold online for $200 to $300, said William Ross, deputy director of the federal government’s National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which investigates bogus parts.
Buyers often include people who are doing car repairs at home to save money or as a makeshift business, Ross said.
At a dealership or reputable repair shop, the price of getting your air bag replaced after deployment in a crash can escalate to between $2,000 and $3,000 when including labor costs, said William Hawkins, a repair shop manager in Annapolis, Maryland, and board member of the Washington Metropolitan Au- to Body Association.
Insurance companies can be the victims of fraud when an illicit shop installs a black market air bag but files a claim for the full cost of a new one.
While the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center does not have data on air bag theft, Ross said the center is “aware that’s happening.” He said the organization’s black market air bag efforts focus primarily on stemming the flow of counterfeit parts from China to the U.S.
Ross said black market air bags don’t typically “infiltrate the legitimate supply chain” of dealerships and upstanding repair shops.
Instead, he said, they often end up for sale on dubious websites. He said the group has worked closely with eBay and Amazon to roll out policies banning illicit air bags, but it’s impossible to stop it altogether.
While authorities suspect that people have been killed as a result of black market air bags failing to perform properly, Ross said it’s difficult to say definitively because such tests aren’t typically conducted after the fact to ascertain whether an air bag was authentically obtained.