Keep Car Thieves Away by Painting Your Vehicle Pink

Amy Tokic
by Amy Tokic

You know how car alarms go off and no one pays any attention to them? Sure, they’re annoying, but now that we’re used to them, it just becomes part of the urban white noise. Forget installing a car alarm – if you want to protect your car against theft, just paint it pink.

We’re not sure if the girlish paint job would scare off car-jackers from taking your Lamborghini Murcielago LP 670-4 or Audi R8. But the one thing we are sure about is that car thieves are in the business of making money, and they know that the most popular colors will bring in the highest resale value. Here’s the breakdown of the most popular colors in 2010: White came in first with 20 percent of new car consumers picking this color, followed by 17 percent in black and silver, and 13 percent chose blue. Even though a white and a yellow car cost the same price, the resale value of the white car can be up to $1,000 more.

So the colors that will keep those pesky thieves away from your car are yellow, gold, brown, beige and other bright colors (like pink). They have a lower resale value, and are more likely to stick out if a car thief is trying to make a clean get-away.

And there’s a study to back this information up. A study in the Netherlands detailed car thieves’ preferences – from 2004 to 2008, the most commonly colored vehicle stolen was black, followed by gray/silver cars. And what about the 109 pink cars they used in the study? You guessed it – not one was stolen, proving that a bright and uncommon color may be as effective deterrent as an expensive security system. Ben Vollaard, who conducted the research, says, “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 Audi R8 device.”

[Source: Family Home Security]

Amy Tokic
Amy Tokic

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