Fleet Theft is Exploding - Is Your Business Next?
Bad news: crooks are targeting your company’s vehicles. Good news: GPS can help stop these SOBs.
Our team here at BrickHouse GPS found a funny little detail while we were researching commercial vehicle theft. (If you don’t laugh at this stuff, it’ll make you cry.)
According to an AutoInsurance.com report, 2024 State of Auto Theft in the US, “Colorado is the biggest state for auto theft, with 583 thefts per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023. In other words, you are 91% more likely to experience motor vehicle theft in Colorado than in the rest of the country.”
That stat seemed strange. Why Colorado? But then it hit us: Of course it’s Colorado! Have you ever tried to live at that altitude? It’s a challenge just to breathe. Anybody who has to walk anywhere in that state probably considers just stealing a car instead.
(By the way, quick side note: The report specified Colorado was the worst “state” for vehicle theft. But the authors also explained that the highest rate of auto theft overall wasn’t in a state—it was in Washington, DC. As if you needed another reason to hate that place.)
The worrying stats on vehicle theft
Unfortunately, the rest of that State of Auto Theft report was more crying than laughing.
Citing research from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), the report pointed out that although vehicle theft had been steadily decreasing since the early 1990s, there was a sudden spike starting in 2019. Vehicle theft then increased about 28% between 2019 and 2023. (It hasn’t stopped since then either, as we’ll show you below with another stat.)
No matter how you slice the data, the news is terrible for any US-based business or individual who owns a vehicle and would like to find it parked where they left it.
According to a 2024 report from the US Department of Transportation, thieves stole 25% more vehicles in 2023 than in the previous few years. (And remember, in those previous few years auto thefts were already up more than they had been in decades.) The report noted that throughout 2023, a vehicle was stolen every 31 seconds. Terrible, yes, but you’ve got to admire the thieves’ ambition.
Thanks again, Covid!
Like so many things going wrong today, we can trace some of the auto-theft increase back to the 2020 Covid lockdowns. The report suggests the chaos created by the pandemic was one key reason for the spike in stolen cars and trucks.
The NICB researchers attributed the trend partly to the sudden unemployment and economic hardships brought on by the pandemic and lockdowns. But they also cited another way Covid probably led to more stolen vehicles—and here’s where your business should take notice.
According to an expert cited in the report, because more people were working from home (or laid off from their companies altogether), there was less physical surveillance at commercial facilities where vehicles were stored. Thanks to the lockdowns and remote-work trends, thieves had an easier time driving off with commercial trucks and utility vehicles in parking lots and garages that, during normal times, would’ve been hopping with employees.
But we’ve also identified another way Covid might have contributed (and might still be contributing) to increased risks of commercial vehicle theft.
Many businesses, including several BrickHouse GPS customers we’ve talked with since the pandemic, began allowing their employees to take home their work vehicles. The business logic is sound: During the pandemic, you might have been legally prohibited from letting employees come into the office. But if your company was deemed an “essential business,” you might have been able to continue scheduling customer appointments and sending your field service employees out to job sites to perform their work.
That meant you were able to keep your business running. But it also meant your company’s costly vehicles—probably loaded with costly equipment as well—spent their nights parked in residential driveways or on quiet neighborhood streets, with no security, instead of locked behind your business’s gates.
If you’re still allowing your field techs to take home your vehicles, you have one more reason to equip the vehicles themselves—as well as your more expensive machinery and other fixed assets—with some sort of real-time tracking technology like GPS.
But even if you’re locking your company’s entire fleet in a safe location every night, watched 24/7 by cameras, you still have plenty of reasons to install those trackers on both your vehicles and the expensive equipment they carry every day.
An auto thief steals a lot more than your company’s vehicle
Becoming a victim of auto theft can have a massive psychological effect on even the calmest, coolest among us. (Where the #@&* is my $#@^&% car?!)
But for your business, losing a service vehicle to theft can have a lot more than a psychological effect. It can create downtime you can’t afford, cost your business jobs, negatively affect relationships with customers, undermine your company’s reputation, and reduce your employees’ earnings.
And don’t forget having to replace the expensive equipment those vehicles carry to and from job sites. In our experience, the machinery and tools your field techs haul to their appointments can cost as much as the vehicles themselves, depending on your industry.
To give you just one real-world example—from the bazillion or so we could’ve listed here—the National Association of Landscape Professionals published the story of a Virginia-based landscaping business that had $40,000 worth of equipment stolen from one of their vehicles in the field. The thieves walked off with lawn mowers, gas-string trimmers, a battery-powered blower, and other costly machinery.
Considering the value of that equipment, the landscaping company would’ve been wise to add tracking devices to each of those items—just in case something like this happened.
As you’ll see from the stats below, if you’re not tracking your business’s expensive equipment, the chances are near zero (and in some cases, actually zero) that you’ll ever recover them if they’re stolen.
The low odds of recovering stolen property
In 2019, the FBI published a study showing all thefts that year of various types of commercial property and their rates of recovery. Again, the data tell a story more likely to make you cry than laugh.
Stolen cargo and the rate at which the cops recovered it:
(The “good” news)
Trailers: 48.1% recovered.
Explosives: 86.6% recovered. (Well, thank goodness. But what about the 13.4%?!)
(The bad news)
Motor vehicles: 37.2%
Lawn/garden equipment: 0.0%
Industrial equipment: 0.0%
If your company’s utility vehicle gets stolen from a jobsite or your employee’s driveaway, you have just a little better than a one in three chance of ever seeing that vehicle again. (And you’re almost certain to permanently lose whatever machines and tools your field tech was carrying in the vehicle at the time.) Not good odds.
The FBI’s report didn’t specify what percentage of these victims (if any) had tracking devices on the stolen property. We have to assume that if literally none of the industrial and landscaping equipment was ever recovered by law enforcement, that percentage must have been low.
But you can also assume that if you add a tracking solution to your vehicles and heavy equipment, the odds increase considerably that you’ll recover your property after a theft.
And we’ve got a suggestion for you there.
Use GPS to stop the SOBs
Thankfully, GPS vehicle tracking has gotten both more sophisticated and more affordable in recent years. And the devices themselves—at least the better ones—have also gotten more discreet and easier to hide, so even the smarter auto thieves won’t know they’re there.
Here are just a few ways adding the right GPS device to your fleet vehicles (and equipment assets) can increase your chances of recovering your stolen property.
- Geofence alerts You can easily “draw” a virtual fence around your vehicle’s safe zone using the GPS app’s online map. If you park your fleet in a gated lot at night, you can draw a geofence around that lot. You’ll then get an alert (by text or app notification) any time one of your trucks crosses that virtual fence.
- Movement alerts You can also get alerted whenever a vehicle starts moving when it’s supposed to be stopped (at a jobsite, in your parking lot, at an employee’s house). You can set your movement alerts for specific hours overnight, for example. If one of your trucks starts moving during that time period, the app will let you know right away.
- Real-time location data If the worst happens, and a thief manages to drive off with your company vehicle, you’ll have the vehicle’s real-time location on your mobile app—updated every few seconds. Just call the police, tell them about your GPS tracker (they’ll thank you!), and talk them through the thief’s movements until they get there.
Sorry, bad guys. But we’ve had enough.
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