Posted On: March 4, 2005, 8:10 am CST

Posted By: Florida Product Analyst

Joe CA nailed one of the prime reasons these older cars get stolen -- parts. A couple of years ago my 1989 Chevy Caprice was stolen; incidentally, it was the first year that car wasn't on the top 10 list. The police found it a week or three later in a field with a few other cars, all of them completely stripped down for parts. They even took the oil-stained floor mats and the lock out of the trunk.

Moving a hot car can be risky. Moving hot parts, however, seems to be darn easy without VIN-etching. Most of these older cars will not have any VIN-etching at all, and their parts will be hard to come by cheaply... unless you "make your own" used parts by stealing them.

And as for this using the 2003 data -- it seems pretty standard for auto insurance-related news to run a year behind. This is certainly true for accident data. They say it's the latest year for which complete info is available, and even in this age of digital databases, I'll believe them.