Chevrolet built its last new Camaro in January 2024, ending a nameplate that had run, with one hiatus, since 1966. The final sixth-generation cars came off the line at the Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant in Michigan, and NBC News confirmed no successor had been announced at the time. You cannot walk into a Chevy dealership and order a new one today. And yet, according to theft data the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) published this month, the high-performance Camaro ZL1 is the single most-stolen vehicle in the United States, by a wide margin, relative to how many exist on the road, per the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s own release.
A Theft Rate, Not a Body Count
HLDI’s ranking isn’t a raw count of how many of each car got stolen last year. It’s a rate, and the difference matters. The institute compares insurance theft-claim payouts against collision-claim payouts for the same vehicle, which lets it estimate how often a given model gets stolen relative to how many of that model are actually insured and on the road, according to IIHS-HLDI’s methodology. A raw-count list would always favor whatever pickup or sedan sells the most copies. HLDI’s relative-frequency approach instead asks a sharper question: if you own this specific car, how much more likely is it to get stolen than the average vehicle? That framing is exactly why a car GM no longer builds can still top the chart.
The Numbers
On HLDI’s relative-frequency scale, where 100 represents the average vehicle, the Camaro ZL1 scored 3,949 — a theft rate 39 times the national average, on a car with a sticker price around $75,400, according to CBS News’s reporting on the data. The standard Camaro wasn’t far behind at 1,287, or 13 times average, landing at No. 3 on HLDI’s list. Rounding out the top five: the all-wheel-drive Acura TLX at 2,138 (21 times average), the GMC Sierra 2500 crew cab 4WD at 1,023, and the front-wheel-drive Acura TLX at 805, per IIHS-HLDI. “Muscle cars have often topped this list, as thieves are attracted to vehicles with high horsepower,” Matt Moore, HLDI’s chief insurance operations officer, said in the institute’s release.
Why a Car Nobody’s Building Is Still a Target
The ZL1’s vulnerability traces to a specific engineering choice. HLDI’s data shows theft claims on Camaros climbing sharply starting in 2023 and peaking in March 2024 at 18.3 claims per 1,000 insured vehicle-years, tied to the keyless push-button start system Chevrolet introduced across the lineup beginning with the 2016 model year. Moore told CBS News the cars carry “a vulnerability that makes them relatively easy to steal” through the onboard data port, exploitable by anyone with “the right knowledge and right bits of technology.” GM responded with a free software update campaign for 2020-2024 Camaros that began rolling out in March 2025. A GM spokesperson told CBS News: “GM counters vehicle theft methods as they evolve. We regularly work with law enforcement agencies to identify emerging tactics.”
That last detail is the whole story in miniature. Because the Camaro is out of production, GM can’t fix the vulnerability by changing next year’s model — there is no next year’s model. Every ZL1 that will ever exist was already built before production ended in January 2024, and the only lever left is patching the software in cars people already own. That’s a materially different position than a current model with a known security flaw, where an automaker can at least engineer the problem out of future production runs even while older units on the road stay exposed.
What It Means If You Own or Are Shopping for One
For current ZL1 owners, the practical takeaway is straightforward: confirm the free software update has actually been installed, since HLDI’s data reflects claims activity from before the fix saw wide adoption. For anyone shopping the used market, now the only market for a new-to-you Camaro, expect insurers to price that theft risk into comprehensive coverage premiums, and expect it to matter more, not less, as the total supply of ZL1s on the road only shrinks from here with no new production to replenish it.
The Camaro’s exit from showrooms didn’t make it less interesting to a thief. If anything, a fixed, shrinking population of a car built specifically to be as powerful and desirable as GM could make it is close to an ideal target profile. Discontinued doesn’t mean gone, and on this particular list, it doesn’t even mean off the podium.