More than one in 10 Corvettes stolen over past 30 years

“America’s sports car”, the Chevrolet Corvette, has a long and storied history. First introduced in January 1953 at the Motorama Show held at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the car went into full production in June that year at the General Motors facility in Flint, Michigan. By the end of 1953, 300 Corvettes were produced – all of them white convertibles with red interiors and black soft-tops. At a cost of $3,498, the cars offered a heater and an AM radio as the only option.

Since its inception, Chevrolet has produced more than 1.5 million Corvettes. Fans of the American classic sports car are varied:  research by Specialty Equipment Market Association and Experian Automotive found that  as of 2009, there were approximately 750,000 Corvettes of all model years registered in the United States. Corvette owners were fairly equally distributed throughout the country, with the highest density in Michigan (3.47 per 1000 residents) and the lowest density in Utah, Mississippi, and Hawaii. Nearly half (47 percent) of owners hold college degrees (significantly above the nationwide average of 27 percent), and 82 percent are between ages of 40 and 69 (median age being 53).

The Corvette’s popularity has also often made this model a target for theft. The US-based National Insurance Crime Bureau examined Corvette thefts and found that in the last 30 years, more than one in ten Corvettes has been stolen.

From 1981 to 2011, 862,918 Corvettes were produced and 90,427 were stolen in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

The following graph shows the 10 most stolen Corvette model years for the period 1981-2011.

As for the top 10 states where most thefts occurred, California leads the nation with 14,002. Of the overall total, 90,427 thefts, 63,409 of them—70 percent—occurred in the top 10 states.

You might also be interested in: Most frequently stolen Ford Mustangs 

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