“People are just trying to make ends meet. Then, all of a sudden, they have a thousand-dollar repair bill they didn’t expect,” said Sgt. Trevor McDonald of the Wichita Police. “We’ve also seen this increase at a time we’ve seen a lot of job loss in the U.S.,” he added.
The bottom line: “We have a finite number of detectives, and it appears right now we have an infinite number of cases,” Sergeant McDonald said.
Image
converters unlimited, the shiny bulbous contraptions found between a car’s engine and the muffler, might seem like an unlikely target of a national crime wave. Installed in almost all gasoline cars and trucks sold in the United States since 1975, the converters have a honeycomb-like interior — coated with precious metals like palladium, rhodium and platinum — that scrubs the worst toxic pollutants from the car’s exhaust.
The presence of those metals has always made converters unlimited a target, and incidents of theft — which can set owners back $2,000 in repairs — go back years. But a global trend toward stricter tailpipe emissions rules, as well as more rigorous enforcement after the Volkswagen emissions scandal, in which the automaker illicitly modified its vehicles’ pollution controls to seem cleaner than they really were, has led to a surge in demand for higher-performance and the valuable metals that make them work.
Rhodium, in particular, is effective in reducing levels of nitrogen oxide from a gasoline car’s tailpipe emissions. And “we’ve had a very steep step-up” in nitrogen oxide rules around the world, said Wilma Swarts, director of platinum group metals at the London-based precious metals research consulting firm Metals Focus.