- Thieves are increasingly drilling holes into gas tanks as fuel prices soar.
- Modern anti-siphon designs have made traditional fuel theft far more difficult.
- Victims face repair bills of up to $3,000, as the tank has to be replaced.
Fuel prices are climbing thanks to the war with Iran, and the cost of living isn’t exactly dropping to balance things out. As a result, authorities are reporting an uptick in fuel theft. The trouble is that anti-siphoning technology is so good that thieves are resorting to more destructive methods. In some cases, they’re stealing as little as $25 worth of gas while leaving a four-figure repair bill in their wake.
Lupes Armas, a service advisor at a repair shop in Los Angeles, tells The Detroit News that he’s seeing a drilled-out gas tank come into the business about once a week. That’s right. Forget siphoning. Thieves are simply drilling a hole in the tank and letting gasoline or diesel flow into another container. It brings a whole new perspective to the phrase ‘drill baby drill’.
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For 31-year-old Arizona driver Tasi Malala, it turned a simple breakfast run into a week-long headache. While filling up his Toyota pickup outside Scottsdale last month, he noticed fuel pouring from underneath the truck. “I looked under my truck, and it’s literally gas just pouring out the bottom,” he said. “It’s pouring out like crazy. I was freaking out.” The thief had left behind a perfectly round hole in the tank. Malala ended up with nearly $3,000 in repairs and was without his truck for about a week.
The Shift
Back in the 1970s, thieves could simply feed a hose into a car’s fuel filler neck and drain the tank. That trick became a staple of movies and TV during the fuel crises of the era. But modern vehicles have largely shut the door on that approach.
Today’s cars often use narrower, curved filler necks, along with internal flaps and anti-siphon baffles that make it almost impossible to get a tube into the tank. Emissions regulations have also resulted in more tightly sealed fuel systems. All those improvements did indeed make fuel theft much harder. At the same time, they’ve now just pushed thieves toward a more destructive solution.
Police in Spokane say they recently caught up with a man they believe stole fuel in this manner. He allegedly got all of $25 worth of gas but caused over $2,000 worth of damage to the vehicle in question. Comprehensive insurance usually covers this kind of thing but short of that, owners can end up paying out of pocket. Perhaps we’ll soon see metal gas tank skid plates become big business, the same way we saw anti-catalytic converter theft devices pop up in recent years.
