Motor vehicle theft
theft of vehicles
Motor vehicle theft or car theft (also known as a grand theft auto in the United States) is the criminal act of stealing or attempting to steal a motor vehicle.
In 2020, there were 810,400 vehicles reported stolen in the United States, up from 724,872 in 2019. Property losses due to motor vehicle theft in 2020 were estimated at $7.4 billion. There were 505,100 car thefts in the European Union (EU) in 2019.
Methods
Some methods used by criminals to steal motor vehicles:
Theft of an unattended vehicle without a key: the removal of a parked vehicle either by breaking and entry, followed by hotwiring or other tampering methods to start the vehicle, or else towing. In London, the police say that 50% of the annual 20,000 car thefts are now from high-tech on-board diagnostic key-cloning kits (available online) and immobiliser bypass tools.
Taking without owner's consent (TWOC): the unauthorized use of a car short of theft. This term is used in the United Kingdom, as is the derivative "twocking".
Opportunistic theft: either the removal of a vehicle that is unattended with the keys visible and sometimes the engine idling, or theft of a vehicle offered for sale during what the thief represents as a test drive. A "test drive" may also give a potential thief insight into where the vehicle keys are stored, so that the thief may return later to steal the vehicle.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Motor vehicle theft” is theft of vehicles. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Motor, vehicle and theft, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q548007. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Motor vehicle theft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.