This B.C. inventor hopes to help curb the catalytic converter crime wave
The exhaust-cleaning vehicle parts hold the world's most precious metals. Stealing them take minutes
An inventor in B.C.'s Okanagan Valley jokes that his neighbours probably hate him after several years of frequently blasting car alarms.
But Rod Newlove, who invented the Converter Defender alarm system, thinks it's worth it in his battle against catalytic converter theft.
Thieves are becoming increasingly brazen in their hunt for the extremely lucrative precious metals inside the exhaust-cleaning devices.
"They'll crawl underneath the vehicle and Sawzall off the converter," Newlove told CBC News from his workshop in Lake Country, about a 23-kilometre drive north of Kelowna. "They can make fantastic money for 10 minutes worth of work."
That fantastic money is because the automotive parts, which reduce exhaust pollution from non-electric vehicles, contain the most precious metals in the world.
In B.C., like many parts of North America, theft of the essential car parts has revved up massively.
According to recently obtained data from ICBC, B.C.'s public auto insurer, the number of catalytic converter thefts and attempted thefts increased more than 40-fold in just six years — from 141 reports in 2017 to 6,156 in 2022. Previously available data from 2022 shows between half and two-thirds of the reports were for completed thefts.
The cost to taxpayers is well over $4 million a year, the insurer said. And vehicles are rendered inoperable without the parts.
"For ICBC, yes, it is costing us a lot of money," spokesperson Karin Klein told CBC News in April.
World's most precious metals
The problem is not only debilitating for individual motorists.
Thefts have also caused mayhem in the non-profit and public sectors, including a Vancouver furniture delivery charity, school buses in Winnipeg and Calgary, Canada Post's fleet, and Nova Scotian food bank deliveries.
Even public transit has been targeted — and last year a Winnipeg mayoral candidate's election bid was stalled when her campaign RV's catalytic converter was sawed off.
"Everyone is at risk of having it stolen," said Tyler Mierzwa, a Simon Fraser University criminology Master's student, who focuses on catalytic converter and other metal theft. "Family members, yourself, even buses, local community vehicles, city trucks.
"There could be some real dire consequences to catalytic converter theft."
Catalytic converters contain extremely valuable metals known as the platinum group, which includes rhodium, palladium, and platinum.
Rhodium, valued at nearly $6,000 an ounce, is the world's most valuable precious metal and more than double the cost of gold, according to Reuters; meanwhile an ounce of palladium costs nearly $1,300, and platinum more than $1,200.
Nearly a quarter of the world's platinum group supply came from scrapped catalytic converters, Natural Resources Canada notes.
Is there a solution?
Newlove's Converter Defender includes a 135-decibel horn — nearly as loud as a jet engine — and a sensor on the catalytic converter.
"Any movement at all in the exhaust system or tampering with the sensor sets off a horn," Newlove said. "It will scare the people away — or draw attention to them anyhow."
It's one of a number of attempts Canadians are making in hopes of stopping thefts.
One Alberta mother and her daughter invented FoilemFence, a metal bar that acts as a protective skirt for a vehicle's underside, pinned to the ground by all four tires. Their invention won a $50,000 contest by Edmonton Police Foundation this year.
Others are wrapping wire cables around the devices in an effort to at least slow down would-be thieves.
ICBC recommends only parking in secure or well-lit areas with a lot of pedestrian traffic. But whether the growing epidemic of thefts can actually be throttled has yet to be seen.
Last spring Surrey, B.C., launched a program to etch vehicle identification numbers (VINs) — a 17-digit code unique to every vehicle — directly onto catalytic converters to prevent them from being sold illegally.
It came a year after the B.C. government revised its regulations for metal dealers, forcing them to see scrap-sellers' identification, and report each transaction to police.
"It's a start for sure," Mierzwa said. "It's unreasonable to expect every single motor vehicle owner in British Columbia to go and protect their catalytic converter — it's expensive."
But changing rules isn't enough, he warned, especially as the black market grows.
"Legislation was thought to be the end-all, be-all answer," he said. "[Governments] might need to invest a little bit more money into the reporting system, maybe subsidize some of the crime prevention measures for metal dealers."
While he agrees motorists may want to consider defensive measures such as getting their VIN etched on their catalytic converter, or considering an alarm system, much of the solution needs to come from how government regulates the scrap-dealing industry, and how it monitors province-wide data of where and when most thefts take place.
He said he'd like to see B.C. adopt a centralized, digital reporting system for the thefts, like Alberta and other jurisdictions have.
Newlove said until the scrap metal black market is stamped out, motorists will likely continue to try to protect their catalytic converters with creative solutions like his.
"I've heard lots of good stories from shops about how it's actually stopped thefts," he said.
"[Buyers] have actually caught people running away from their vehicles when they'd been trying to remove them."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Moira Wyton