Not So Fun Fact: Stolen Motorcycles on the Rise – Again
Just say you manage to ride 10 of your motorcycles from Calgary to California. Maybe you’ve got a far larger garage at your winter abode in Palm Springs than you do back home in Alberta. How would you go about doing this? Perhaps you leave Friday afternoon, ride hard and fly back on the red-eye on Sunday night. Logistics aside, this is a cautionary tale. The Nation Insurance Crime Bureau in the U.S. has just reported that motorcycle thefts have increase by 7% from 2021 t0 2022 (the most recent year for full data). This is the third straight year the rate has increased for the number of stolen motorcycles as the total reached almost 55,000.
That’s pretty bad news but we could paint a even grimmer picture is we start parsing the data further. Firstly you had to go and pick Palm Springs for your winter home rather than say, Tucson or Palm Beach. California is by far the location of most motorcycle thefts and accounts for 30% on the entire number of theft for the whole country. To be fair, California is home to by far the most number of motorcycles in the entire U.S. so keep in mind your collection of motorcycles is only a tiny drop in the entire motorcycle bucket.
But there is another problem to consider. Your collection of motorcycles is strictly a Honda affair. You just love Hondas and no other brand quite does it for you. You have a Honda Rune because you saw past all the ridicule and snapped on up – well after it had sat on a showroom floor for a year or two. There is the 1986 Honda VFR750 because you knew that V4 bikes were going to be the future of sport bikes, there is the Honda DN-01 because you didn’t know what is was when you bought it and you are still trying to figure it out, there is the old Honda CB750 because everyone had one (not everyone like a 1968 Triumph Bonnevile but close), a Fury because you have good taste, a Honda CB1100XX because you always rooted for the underdog, a Fury because it is damn good looking bike…
It is a great collection, problem is that the most stolen motorcycles in the USA from a brand perspective for the period is …. drum roll …. (this isn’t going to be a surprise) Honda. Honda has sizeable lead over 2nd place finisher Yamaha and 3rd placed Harley-Davidson. If we have you worried there is some good news, kinda. Say the worst thing happens and you open the garage and your entire collection of 10 Honda motorcycles has been stolen! Will you ever see them again?
Odds are you will see some of them again. Four to be precise because 40% is the average recovery rate of stolen motorcycles in the U.S. We would guess that the DN-01 would be one of them. It would dropped at the side of the road a few blocks from your house because even the thieves couldn’t figure that thing out.
There is one more piece of good news in this story. You brought all your bikes down from Calgary for the winter for some California sunshine and December riding. The winter months are the least likely months for bikes to get stolen. So there is that.
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