Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.
Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.
Is that really how cat theft works- thief gets a couple hundred and it’s smuggled offshore and broken up for raw materials to make new cats? Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair maybe the very car it was stolen from? Are cats serialized and tracked?
When I was in Central America people would steal windshields from cars left outside at night. New replacements were very expensive because of import taxes but you could just go to the nearest shady shop and what do you know, they just happen to have a used one for your car in stock!
> Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair
Because there are federal laws against selling for re-use and installing used emissions parts[1] and there are federal laws that make the remanufacturing operation you'd need to make "new cats" less profitable than shipping the used stuff overseas and doing it there.
When my cat was stolen, I was living in California, where only state-certified exhausts will pass emissions testing. And to date, the state has only certified OEM exhausts for Priuses.
So in my case, it was especially egregious (seriously, people have been petitioning Toyota for decades to recall Priuses to make the cat harder to steal), but in general, if you’ve got the OK to sell exhausts in California, you’re not going to endanger it by coming anywhere close to an illegal platinum/palladium fencing operation.
Portable electric power tools, which are likely stolen themselves, can make quick work of almost anything. Only thing that stops even more theft is the tools themselves will get pawned for drug money quick enough.
Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.