Another Electric Vehicle Benefit: No Catalytic Converters To Be Stolen

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There is sort of a humorous situation in the US now with some people having a bit of gasoline price anxiety because of geopolitical conflict and instability. It may be seen as humorous because the cost of climate change impacts globally could be trillions of dollars and some Americans are worried about an increase of 40 cents per gallon of gasoline. Fossil fuel combustion is the main cause of climate change and fossil fuel emissions harm humans, causing various illnesses and premature deaths.

There is another cost to using gas vehicles: the cost of stolen parts. The other day I noticed in some online police reports there was a flurry of catalytic converter thefts in a small town in California in just two days or so.

If the average cost to replace one is about $2,000 to $2,500, this amount may be more than the cost of gasoline for a whole year for some drivers. For a luxury vehicle or hybrid, a catalytic converter replacement might be well over $2,500.

While it may be difficult to document the annual total number of thefts for a variety of reasons, one estimate is that it could be hundreds of thousands, “Recognizing that less than 45% of the potential theft target vehicles are covered by the property casualty insurance market figures, the total estimated number of insurance market-paid catalytic converter thefts consistent with the State Farm reported numbers would be roughly insurance industry paid 295,000 catalytic converter thefts for the current year 2022, with an overall annualized theft rate estimated to be between 600k–700k total catalytic converter thefts. At an average repair cost of $2,621 a repair, 600k theft losses would have a total estimated repair cost to the public of more than $1.5 Billion Dollars. Given that the total operating vehicle population in the United States is now roughly 250–280 million vehicles, that theft rate represents roughly 2%–2.5% of the active vehicle population.”

One reason is that a great number of vehicle owners don’t have insurance to cover the theft, so they don’t report it and there is no data to track many of the thefts.

Fully electric vehicles don’t have this part to be stolen, nor do they have many others, such as mufflers, spark plugs, injectors, timing belts, head gaskets, exhaust manifolds, etc.

Hybrids and EREVs usually do have catalytic converters which can be stolen, while fully electric vehicles do not have them.