The National Insurance Crime Bureau has announced their latest statistics regarding motorcycle thefts, and said that in 2010, the number of stolen vehicles fell by 24 percent when compared to the total in 2007.
In 2007, there had been 65,678 stolen motorcycles reported, but in 2010, that number fell to 49,791, according to the National Crime Information Center data.
The statistics also identified the makes that were most frequently stolen in 2010. As with automobiles, the top manufacturer of stolen motorcycles was Honda (12,260). This was followed by Yamaha (9,853), then Suzuki (7,869), and Kawasaki (5,470) and finally Harley-Davidson (3,301). The top five makes of motorcycle in terms of theft made up 38,753, or 77.8 percent of all of the thefts that year.
Moreover, the top states for motorcycle theft were also identified for 2010. They were led by California, with 5,662 thefts, and followed by Texas (4,394), Florida (4,148), North Carolina (2,649) and finally Indiana, with 1,925 motorcycles stolen. Together, the top five states for the theft of these vehicles made up 18,778 of the total number across the country, or 37.7 percent.
Though thefts were down overall – which is also the case among all passenger vehicles as well as light trucks – so were the sales of motorcycles. The Motorcycle Industry Council’s data regarding the sales of these vehicles showed that in 2009, there had been 520,502 units sold, but those numbers fell by 16 percent by 2010, when there were only 439,678 units sold.
The highest amount of theft activity in 2010 was during the summer months of July and August, when there were 5,714 and 5,380 stolen vehicles, respectively.
