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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.'"
Of course, if everyone who didn't want their car stolen drove a pink car, then thieves would start stealing pink cars, and some other color would become the least popular.
Palm trees and 8
Nobody wants to be that guy on youtube arrested at the wheel of a pink Miata.
Have stuff nobody wants.
Perhaps the thieves prefer to drive something hard to pick out of a crowd?
Pretty easy to find the stolen pink anything. Not as easy to find the stolen blue Civic. If you have a choice of cars (and in most cases thieves do) you'd pick something you can get away with for longer.
Drive a stick shift :)
Of course, the crazy colour will also affect resale value, so the money you save in insurance you lose in depreciation.
For example, pink cars might garner a greater degree of derision, leading to a greater incidence of vandalism. They might be pulled over more for speeding. Their owners might be more often victims of other crimes. Mechanics might inflate prices more.
What you want to look at is the "total cost of ownership" for the car over a period of time, as a function of color.
Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkWf4crJ9uI#t=2m18s :)
If you don't want viruses, run Linux!
The "Hello Kitty Car".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If only there was some way to replace the paint colors with colors of our own choosing. If only we possessed that level of technology...
from : http://leasticoulddo.com/comic/20100719
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.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
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.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Here:
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/5262
I generally agree with you though, I'm not sure the conclusions are valid from what's given. It basically says 0.26% of black cars, the most stolen colour, get stolen, whilst 0.16% of red cars, the least stolen get stolen. Apparently there's something like 6.8 million vehicles in the Netherlands, but it's hard from the data to tell how many cars this actually translates to in practice, particularly as the graph given changes over time, and older cars will most likely be off the road. I'm sure you could figure it out by averaging the amount bought over the period and factor in an exponential decrease in those taken off the road, but it'd be more reasonable if the author had done this. The very fact he does seem to have basically left things half finished and come to a conclusion without providing better supporting evidence and clearer data does leave me a little skeptical I'll admit, the level of work done would be fine for a high school science class, but for a professor of economics? a bit of a poor show to be honest.
Back in high school, I mostly used mechanical pencils. But I kept breaking them: the metal tips snap off usually within a week of use. Maybe I press down too hard, or they just make shitty pencils where I live.
So I imported from Japan a few very well made--but obviously expensive--mechanical pencils. They have no problem taking my abuse. However, I ended up losing all of them over the course of the semester. I sometimes lend one to a classmate, but I didn't always get it back. I don't think they kept it on purpose, but they simply forgot to return it.
Next semester, I had to import another batch, but I got one in pink. And since then, I only lend out the pink one. I still have most of the pencils I bought then, including the pink one.
You might think that this strategy will only work ~50% of the time, but since I'm posting this on /. you should be able to figure out why I beat the odds.
I've always thought that more people would quit smoking, if cigarettes were pink...
Two baby seats (twins) plus one child seat seems to have solved the car theft problem for me. These days the only lock I bother with on the car is the one that stops the little blighters from opening the doors from the inside.
If someone stole the stereo and the collection of children's song CDs from the car, I'd consider that a blessing. Well, apart from Lazytown, which sounds similar enough to Scooter that I might miss it.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Societal norms would quickly change anyway. Less than a century ago, in western culture, blue was the color for girls...and pink for boys.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Did you really just put this disclaimer in a reply to the post ending with "I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics"?...
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Your grasp of statistics is poor. Consider the effect if there were only a SINGLE pink car in a study. Then when you say 0 pink cars were stolen, your study is no better than me saying my car has never been stolen. Now imagine what would have happened if the single guy with a pink car happened to have his car towed for illegally parking and didn't realized what had happened till after the article was published. Now you have 100% of pink cars being stolen. Sample size is ALWAYS important, regardless of the percentage.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
When my boys were growing up, they were constantly stealing my underwear. I made them do their own laundry but they didn't get to that chore as often as they should have so they felt free, despite my protests, to dip into my underwear drawer. Nothing worked until I died my shorts pink.
My girlfriend thought it was funny but I was just happy to be able to rely on having a clean stash of underwear.
have it stolen than color it pink.
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Well, if you really want to be pedantic (and this is /., so who doesn't?), the 95% upper confidence interval of 0 events out of 109 is 2.7%. This does not compare favorably to the average risk of car theft of ~0.25%. I'd need more data to calculate the confidence intervals for risk of theft for black or average cars, but it's likely to be much tighter than +/- 2.5% given the total number of car sold.
So the only think you can say from this study is that there's insufficient data to determine whether pink cars are more or less at risk than cars of another color.
I really hate it when people start prattling along about errors with statistics when they don't bother looking at the actual statistics.
And I really hate it when others start prattling about errors with statistics when they don't know when to take an adequate sample.
In the linked 'study', we find that the highest risk category is for black cars, with a theft risk of approximately 0.25% during the length of the study. We also learn that the number of pink vehicles included in the study is just 109.
If car thieves had an identical preference for pink cars and black cars (don't ask me why), then in a sample this size, there's still only about a 25% chance that any of the pink cars would be stolen over the study period. The sample is too small to draw any meaningful conclusions. It could be that car thieves desperately want to take pink cars, but are having too much trouble finding them.
The data used in this study are insufficient to show that pink cars are less likely to be stolen than the other less-common colors; they aren't even a big enough sample to show that pink cars are safer than the most-stolen colors.
~Idarubicin
With a mean probability of 0.1% of theft (at least it looks close to it in the charts, I do not have the study numbers), a sample size of 109 cars may be too small.
To put an analogy, think that a medical researcher goes to a city of 10.000 people and finds that there are 10 cancer patients, and when he goes to the village with 100 people then claims that there is some kind of cancer cure in that village because there are no cancer patients in it.... Hardly significative at all..
Why can't
I highly doubt the case. The pink cars are always a repaint. Theives know that pink is not a color that is sold off a car lot. But, paint a Porsche, Lexus, Bugatti, etc pink, and the car will still be stolen.
I drove for 4-5 years a pink car. It was a type of car likely to be stolen, in an area where cars are being stolen quite frequently, in a visible, big parking area, where practically no one was watching if there's a car being stolen.
Car was easy to steal type, many cars like that even a ice cream stick was enough of a key, on top of that the trunk couldn't be locked so you could get inside from there, and if that's not enough i frequently forgot to lock the doors. It was never stolen, or attempted even.
Not only that, but all the girls were curious about it always ;) It drew eyes like a magnet everytime i drove it around, and girls came talking to me at times just because how the car looked, yet the car had about nothing special in it's looks other than being pink.
Best color for a car, ever.
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