Keyless Car Theft Is Surging in North America – And OEMs, Insurers and Car Owners Are Paying the Price

TL;DR

Keyless car theft is fueling a surge in vehicle theft across the United States and Canada, costing the automotive industry billions each year. Modern thieves are exploiting connected vehicle technologies using keyless techniques like CAN injection, key fob cloning, and relay attacks to bypass traditional anti-theft systems. As theft rates surge and legal and insurance pressures mount, OEMs must adopt proactive, intelligent vehicle protection strategies to address this challenge. PlaxidityX vDome is an AI-powered anti-theft solution that enables OEMs to detect and block keyless theft attempts in real time. 

You wake up in the middle of the night, go to the kitchen for a drink of water, and out of the corner of your eye notice a thin person in black running from a pickup truck to your SUV parked in the driveway. Before you can get outside, you hear the engine start and then helplessly watch your car being driven off. When you go back inside, you see that your key fob is still on the kitchen counter.

If this nightmare scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Car theft continues to run rampant across the US and Canada – and this surge in crime is being fueled by technology. What was once a predominantly physical crime (e.g., throwing a brick through a window) has evolved into an advanced digital threat, resulting in record theft rates across North America. Besides the headaches and anguish for car owners, keyless car theft is causing substantial financial, legal, and reputational damage for OEMs, while also placing a growing strain on insurance companies.

What is Keyless Car Theft?

Over the past decade, car thieves have upped their game from window-smashing and hotwiring to sophisticated cyber techniques designed to bypass immobilizers, electronic locks and alarm systems in seconds. And as cars become more connected and dependent on software, they are increasingly vulnerable to keyless theft techniques, including the following:

1. CAN Injection: Using this method, criminals tap directly into the vehicle’s internal communication network (the CAN bus) and inject fake messages so the car behaves as if it has identified a valid key. Using a small and inexpensive electronic device, thieves connect to the CAN bus wiring via a headlight or diagnostics port, and send a “start engine” signal. This allows them to bypass both the key fob and immobilizer in less than 30 seconds.
   
2. Key Fob Cloning (aka Electronic Reprogramming) is a widespread theft technique whereby thieves break into the car, connect a device to the On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port, and reprogram a blank key. This method requires only a few minutes and is commonly used on delivery vans and rental cars.

3. Relay Attacks: Relay attacks are fast and silent – the entire process takes less than 30 seconds. The attack uses a pair of signal boosting devices – one near the key fob and one near the car. The first device captures the signal from the car owner’s key fob (even through walls), while the second transmits it to the car, tricking it into unlocking and starting the engine. Unlike the previous methods, there’s no need to hack the vehicle network.
   
   

All of these advanced theft techniques enable thieves to gain easy entry without causing damage to the vehicle, making such thefts difficult to detect through traditional means.

Where Does Keyless Car Theft Happen?

Keyless car theft can happen just about anywhere a car is left unattended. Some examples of the more common scenarios are as follows:

Stealing a parked vehicle

Thieves exploit external access points, such as smart headlight wiring, to perform CAN bus injection while the car is parked. By sending a spoofed “ignition” command directly into the vehicle’s internal network, they bypass the factory immobilizer in seconds, start the engine and silently drive off.
vDome’s edge agent identifies the unauthorised source and kills the command instantly, neutralising the attack before the engine can start.

Theft after visiting a service centre or using valet parking 

Temporary custody of a vehicle at a service centre or valet parking service exposes it to “in-vehicle” hacking. In such a scenario, the thieves (i.e., the service employees) can access the OBD-II port to program a “blank” key fob into your car’s memory. This creates a permanent, authorized “backdoor” that allows them to steal the vehicle later without any sign of forced entry. Often, thieves implant an “air tag” in the car for easy tracking until they decide to steal it.

Rental car theft

Rental fleets are increasingly targeted by “pro-renter” schemes, in which criminals rent a car specifically to copy its digital signature or install rogue hardware for later retrieval. Then, the thieves embed an “air tag” in the car to monitor its location and wait for the right time to execute the actual theft. This creates a massive liability for fleet owners once the car is back in circulation.

Underground parking garages  

Thieves target cars in underground garages where concrete structures block GPS and cellular signals, rendering cloud-based trackers and remote alarms completely useless. In these signal-denied “blind spots,” thieves can take their time to bypass standard electronic locks. 

The Soaring Cost of Keyless Car Theft

Car theft is hitting record highs in the US and Canada, costing the industry billions of dollars annually and causing huge disruptions to the way people live, work and travel. 

Despite a slight decrease in 2024 after five years of annual increases, the number of stolen vehicles in the US still surpassed 850,000, which means a motor vehicle was stolen every 37 seconds in the United States in 2024. Approximately 60% of these thefts can be attributed to keyless theft techniques such as CAN injection and key fob duplication.

The repercussions of rising car theft are being felt across the automotive ecosystem. Let’s take a closer look at the impact on OEMs and insurance companies.

Legal Liability for OEMs

Keyless car theft prevention has become business-critical for OEMs. In certain markets, some OEMs are suffering a decline in sales and reputation damage for “theft-prone” models. What’s more, OEMs that have not taken sufficient measures to protect their vehicles from keyless car theft techniques potentially face serious legal consequences.

In December 2025, for example, two popular OEMs agreed to a nationwide settlement whereby both automakers would offer free repairs to millions of models that weren’t equipped with proper anti-theft technology, leading to a wave of car theft. The cost of these repairs could exceed $500 million. 

Other OEMs also face pending lawsuits related to the lack of protective measures against keyless car theft. The lawsuits claim that various models are equipped with anti-theft systems that can be bypassed by criminals to reprogram key fobs and start the engines without the original keys. Other claims point to keyless entry systems that can be easily hacked via a relay attack. In Canada, as well, a class action suit was filed against 13 OEMs in Quebec due to flaws in the keyless entry systems that led to massive numbers of thefts between 2021-2024. 

Auto Insurance Will Never Be the Same

Surging car theft—especially keyless theft—is also transforming the way auto insurance is priced, managed, and regulated worldwide.

More thefts create more comprehensive coverage claims (for total loss, partial damage, or unrecovered cars), causing insurers to raise premiums to cover higher expected payouts across their clientele. According to Insurance Bureau of Canada data, in the first half of 2025, theft-related claim costs totaled $361.5 million. While this represents a modest decrease from 2024, total annual losses to Canadian insurers in 2025 were estimated at $900 million (source).

Theft risk is highly geographic. To offset losses from rising car theft, many auto insurers raised comprehensive coverage rates by 10–25% across theft-prone metro regions such as the District of Columbia, California, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. For vehicles listed among the most frequently stolen, premiums jumped by an average of 17–20%, with high-end SUVs seeing even larger surcharges. This means drivers in high-theft regions or with highly targeted models pay noticeably more even if they are never personally victimized.

Even when national theft totals start to fall—as they did in the US in 2024-2025 —premiums may remain elevated or adjust slowly because insurers set prices based on multi-year trends, prior losses, and uncertainty about whether improvements will last.

New research from the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) illustrates the connection between keyless car theft and insurance rates. Analyzing theft claims for a high-risk brand from 2010-2024, HLDI found that claims for the newer models peaked in March 2024 at 18.3 claims per 1,000 insured vehicle years, compared with about 1.3 claims per 1,000 insured vehicle years for 2010-15 models. It also indicated a clear spike in the pattern beginning with model year 2016, which was when a keyless, push-button start system was introduced.

Prevention of Keyless Car Theft Demands Proactive Vehicle Protection 

Until recently, most anti-theft efforts have focused on trying to track and recover stolen vehicles. In fact, many auto insurance companies require car owners and fleet operators to use stolen vehicle recovery services. However, in order to truly solve the problem, what’s needed is a way to make vehicles more difficult to steal in the first place.

PlaxidityX vDome acts as an embedded shield that prevents theft at the source. vDome is a comprehensive, AI-powered anti-theft service designed to actively protect vehicles from modern, highly sophisticated keyless theft techniques, such as CAN injections, key fob replications, and emulator attacks. Combining an in-vehicle agent with continuous cloud-based threat intelligence, the vDome system actively detects vehicle theft attempts in real-time, including unauthorized vehicle network manipulation (i.e., CAN injection) and unauthorized key fob registration (i.e., key cloning). From a business standpoint, vDome enables OEMs and aftermarket providers to offer advanced anti-theft protection as a premium, subscription-based service, transforming security from a cost center into top-line revenue.

Contact us to learn more about how vDome can help protect your vehicles from keyless car theft techniques.