This story is crazy in so many ways that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’m going to begin in Baltimore. Car thefts are up 95% in Baltimore this year and more than a third of the cars being stolen are Kia’s and Hyundais. Why those specific models? The answer to that involves TikTok, YouTube and a bunch of young teens looking for a thrill. We’ll come back to that in a moment but this week the city of Baltimore has decided to skip over all of those other problems and file a lawsuit against the car manufactures for making cars that are too easy to steal. According to Baltimore, the car companies are fueling a crime wave.

Baltimore City is suing Hyundai and Kia in federal court for actions the city says are fueling a “vehicular crime wave.”

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, claims the business decision by the automakers to not equip vehicles with anti-theft technology is behind the city’s massive spike in car thefts…

The suit argues that the crime has put residents’ property and lives at risk, and drained city coffers in an attempt to stem the rising crime trend.

“It’s everywhere, and they should take responsibility for that,” Simms said.

Baltimore isn’t the first city to do this. St. Louis filed a similar lawsuit in March.

Since May of 2022, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) has received more than 4,500 reports of thefts of Kia or Hyundai vehicles. 61 percent of all vehicles stolen in St. Louis have been Kias and Hyundais, Kias and Hyundais make up 88 percent of all reported attempted vehicle thefts.

Milwaukee sued the companies the same month. City Attorney Tearman Spencer called Milwaukee the epicenter of the problem:

In the first three months of 2023, Milwaukee police say 373 Kias were stolen and 304 Hyundais were stolen. It has cost every Milwaukee taxpayer, regardless of whether their car has been stolen…

“In my estimation, all the problems emanated in Milwaukee, the epicenter of the cause and problems that we’ve been experiencing,” said Spencer.

All of this strikes me as very strange because the companies are being sued for the criminal behavior of the car thieves, behavior that is being encouraged by a TikTok challenge. This local news clip from Atlanta was published last September.

If you watched through the clip, you saw again a mention that all of this seems to have started in Milwaukee with a group who became known as the Kia Boys. Last May, a YouTuber named Tommy G who lives in Milwaukee went to talk to people about the Kia Boys and also to talk to some of the Kia Boys themselves.

This clip (below) really made a splash locally and was covered on the local news at the time. Tommy G described feeling like a war correspondent when making this and he did ask bystanders and the Kia Boys he met some tough questions. On the other hand, he also protected their identities and seemed to be walking a fine line between reporting and adding to the mystique.

That said, there’s no doubt that you’ll learn a lot more about why this is happening from this clip than from almost anywhere else. You have the kids themselves admitting they started doing this in 2020 because it was trending on TikTok. You hear them say they aren’t worried about consequences because police chases get called off and the justice system treats the crime as a misdemeanor. Actually I think grand theft auto is still a felony but it may be true that these cases are getting pleaded down in many cases.

Anyway, it’s clear these are kids with no supervision who just think this is fun. They’re not thinking about their own future or what this does to the city or to the people who have a car stolen or destroyed. They’re just trying to gain some status with their friends and on social media.

Where are their parents? They get asked that and the two kids say their mothers know they have charges for previous thefts. Their moms have told them to stop but that’s about it. For the most part, they seem to be on their own. Even some of the older men in the neighborhood have a boys will be boys attitude.

At the same time, lots of people in the neighborhood are fed up. They’d like to see these kids thrown in prison for a decade to put an end to this. But there are hundreds of Kia Boys and taking a few of them off the street won’t stop the chaos. “Maybe we need more police,” one woman said. Granted, teen boys in every neighborhood do stupid things but what these kids are doing is certainly at the far end of the scale in terms of danger, irresponsibility and harm to the community.

If I had to rank the chain of responsibility myself I’d say it starts with parents, then goes to kids who ought to know better, then to social media companies and last of all to the automakers. What do you think? Do Baltimore and the other cities have a point with these lawsuits? And if the car companies are to blame, what about TikTok which spread the information on how to steal these cars. Is TikTok responsible for turning this into a game and making kids in other cities want to imitate and one up what they see? How do you fix a social problem like this?

Update: Just noticed this story about two people killed in Lodi, California.

Jess Bradford Jr., 21, and Michael Wyrick, 16, died early Monday when the stolen Hyundai they were driving in collided with a fence and a tree at Peterson Park in Lodi, the Lodi Police Department said.

Authorities believe two men were part of a group that stole both the Hyundai and a Kia the previous night, possibly as part of the viral TikTok “Kia challenge,” which involves hotwiring both models with a USB drive, CBS reported.