I think parent-poster means that the easily-stolen cars are being used as tools of carjacking, rather than the targets of it. In particular, carjacking that occurs by somehow provoking a victim to stop on the highway shoulder, a location where attackers can't exactly arrive by foot or bus or bike. That way they don't involve a vehicle that might be observed and traced back to them.

An alternate explanation is that they meant to write something like "theft" and accidentally put down "carjacking" instead.

Part of what makes it unintuitive is the specificity:

  * Why Milwaukee and Chicago instead of everywhere?
  * Why carjacking and not a general increase in crimes that could be facilitated by an unassociated car (bank robbery, toll violations, etc)?

For whatever reason, it became A Thing here more than a year before it went national. Car thefts in Milwaukee more than doubled (entirely due to a stupidly large increase in Kia/Hyundai thefts) and we got a reputation for Kia thefts before it became a national issue

Random presentation of car theft stats comparing Chicago to a handful of others. We hear a lot about Chicago because many have a vested interest in deflecting discussions about crime. When was the last time you heard about the insane motor vehicle theft rate of Dallas? https://public.tableau.com/shared/W2KZH4JC7?:display_count=y...

As the sibling points out: it's a broader issue than just carjackings --- but the carjackings themselves were novel, scared the shit out of people in a way that stochastic-seeming strong arm robberies don't. The headline here is: it was a gravely negligent thing for Kia to have done; I hope they lose their shirts.

It wasn't just in those cities, it was nationwide. The poster was using those cities as examples because they are familiar to him.

Cars are hard to fence and if you have a stolen car there's other crimes you can commit that have similar upsides and lower sentences/risks. For example ATMs never run over your buddies or shoot back at you.