- A man attempted to steal a Porsche in North Hollywood by towing it with a pickup truck, resulting in a chase down Tujunga Avenue and significant damage to the vehicle.
North Hollywood, early Thursday morning, July 16: someone calls the Los Angeles Police Department to report a man trying to steal a Porsche. Officers roll up a little after 6:27 a.m. and find something stranger than a standard smash-and-grab: a gray Porsche hooked to the back of a black pickup truck, engine off, nobody in the driver’s seat. Whoever wanted this car never got past the ignition. So he tried skipping that step entirely and just dragging the thing away.
It did not go well.
Why Steal It When You Can Just Drag It
Late-model Porsches are lousy candidates for a classic hot-wire. The ignition talks to an immobilizer chip embedded in the key, the body control module checks that signature before it will even think about spinning the starter, and the steering column locks itself the instant the car senses it has not been properly authenticated. Rip the column cover off with your hands the way thieves do on cheaper, older cars with exposed ignition barrels, and you are still staring at a wheel that will not turn and an engine that will not catch. There is no USB-cable trick for this one.
Towing sidesteps the whole problem. Chain the car to a truck and you do not need the engine, the key, or the computer’s blessing. You just need the wheels to roll enough to get the vehicle out of sight before someone notices. It is a crude solution, but it is also why organized theft crews increasingly show up with tow straps and pickup trucks instead of laptops and relay boxes.
The Chase Down Tujunga Avenue
That method has a built-in flaw: a car that never authenticated its key typically locks its steering column, not just the ignition, which means the front wheels are frozen at whatever angle they were left. When officers arrived and gave the truck driver orders to stop, he refused and pulled out onto Tujunga Avenue with the Porsche still chained on behind him, dead weight riding on wheels that could not turn to follow the truck’s path…