Star Tribune
With Kia, Hyundai thefts still soaring, Minneapolis City Council calls for NHTSA recall
Thefts of easy-to-steal Kia and Hyundai vehicles continued to skyrocket in Minneapolis in 2023, prompting exasperated Minneapolis leaders to join a chorus of governments asking the federal government to issue a national recall.
While Kia and Hyundai thefts fell somewhat in St. Paul, they’re still way above levels before the scourge of thefts swept the nation in 2022 after the vehicles’ vulnerabilities were shared widely on social media via the infamous “Kia challenge.”
Here are some basic numbers, according to Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments:
- Minneapolis: In 2023, 4,520 auto thefts involving a Kia or Hyundai were reported, up from 2,340 in 2022 — which was up 836% from the year before.
- St. Paul: 694 such thefts were reported in 2023, down from 953 in 2022 — which saw a 611% increase from the year prior.
In addition to overwhelming law enforcement, the scourge has upended the lives of vehicle owners — often repeatedly — as the same cars get broken into and stolen again and again. Over the course of the past two years, 509 vehicles in Minneapolis were stolen more than once.
In one extreme example, a 2017 Kia Sportage was stolen eight times across the metro, including five times in Minneapolis.
And there’s the violence. In 2022, Minneapolis tied stolen Kias and Hyundais to five homicides, 13 shootings, 36 robberies and 265 crashes. Such figures weren’t immediately available for 2023 thefts.
Not reflected in any of those numbers: Kia and Hyundai owners whose vehicles aren’t vulnerable to theft, but whose cars have been broken into and their steering columns ripped open, rendering them undriveable, by would-be thieves targeting the wrong model.
“It’s kind of shocking,” Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne said Wednesday. Payne is the lead sponsor of a resolution signed by all 13 City Council members that’s set to be voted on Thursday morning. The resolution calls on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to initiate a national recall of Kia and Hyundai vehicles not equipped with technology to help prevent theft.
Mayor Jacob Frey is expected to sign it, following the council vote.
This isn’t the first time local leaders have demanded help to address the problem here and across the nation.
Last year, Frey, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called on the two automakers to voluntarily recall the roughly 4 million vehicles that are vulnerable because they were weren’t made with immobilizers that would render them unable to be driven without a key.
Ellison launched an investigation into the auto companies to determine if they violated Minnesota’s consumer protection and public nuisance laws.
Ellison was also among 18 state attorneys general who asked the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to issue a national recall last year. NHTSA has declined to do so, telling the officials that the problem didn’t rise to the level of a safety defect.
The automakers have offered software updates for some vehicles and supplied local police departments with steering wheel locks, and Minneapolis and St. Paul police have held free events for vehicle owners. But the thefts continue.
“This is so unique to Kia and Hyundai,” Payne said. “It’s such a failure of engineering design, and they haven’t addressed it.”
Staff writer Rachel Hutton contributed to this report.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
