If You Don't Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink

pickens writes "A study in the Netherlands illustrates car thieves' preferences. From 2004-2008, the most commonly colored vehicle stolen was black. This may be because black vehicles look more luxurious. Following close behind black were gray/silver automobiles. Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen. A bright and uncommon color, like pink, may be as effective deterrent as an expensive security system. Ben Vollaard, who conducted the research, wrote, 'If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat color is not too high – or if someone actually enjoys it – then buying deterrence through an uncommon car color may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.'"

Comments

Re:How to fail with statistics

[guyminuslife]

All of them. At least, new-ish cars in the Netherlands, in 2004-2008. ...you could have easily looked that up, TFA links to its sources.

Re:More lies with statistics...

[guyminuslife]

Zero. There were exactly zero pink cars stolen. (The study, if you had bothered to look at it, includes all reported thefts of all cars less than 3 years old in the Netherlands from 2004-2008).

I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.

Re:Hm...

[betterunixthanunix]

There is another significant difference: there is no "Linux monoculture," the way there is a "Windows monoculture." If I tell you that I use Linux, I am not really telling you much -- as a case in point, plenty of people look at my monitor and ask, "What the heck operating system is that?!" because they have never seen e16 before. Even a basic trojan would stand out if a user did not have the particular environment that the author thinks they have -- a KDE user will be harder to fool with a trojan that was intended for GNOME users.

As another example, consider the number of viruses that exploit buffer overflows in Windows Media Player. I have seen these files, played in another media player, and they display a simple message: to play this properly, use Windows Media Player. Would such a strategy work for a desktop Linux user? Well, again, which media player would you target? There is no one universally installed media player across different distros or different "flavors" of a single distro. Your trojan is going to be less successful if you need to force people to open their package manager and search for a given media player first.

These sort of things basically dull the impact of viruses. It is still possible to write viruses, of course, but it will be harder to spread a single virus as rapidly.

Actually... No. It is quite the opposite.

[denzacar]

From TFA:

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262

It's resale value, not the fear of getting caught

Is it only resale value that drives the preference of thieves for cars in common exterior colours or does the probability of apprehension also play a role?
The recent history of car theft gives us some idea. Red is obviously a bright colour that attracts attention - including that of the police.
Red is also a colour that has fallen out of fashion since the turn of the century (Figure 1).
In the beginning of the 1990s around 25% of all new cars were red, now the number is close to 5%.
The decline of red doesn't only go for the Netherlands, but is a worldwide trend according data from DuPont.
If thieves are primarily interested in resale value and do not care much about being spotted in a bright coloured car, then we should see higher rates of theft for red cars in the 1990s.
That is exactly what we find. Figure 3 shows that, just with the colour silver/grey, the popularity of red in new car sales is tightly linked with the prevalence of red among stolen cars.
This suggests that car thieves do not seem to be particularly worried about being picked out from traffic by police.

Figure 3. Popularity of colour in new car sales vs. theft risk by colour, the Netherlands
http://www.voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/Vollaardfig3.png

Source: CBS/RDW

Conclusion

Differences in theft rates between cars in common and uncommon colour suggest that resale value is on the mind of car thieves.
We find evidence that it is indeed the resale value rather than the fear of getting caught that is driving this difference.
If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat colour is not too high - or if someone actually enjoys it - then buying deterrence through an uncommon car colour may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.