Hapless Car Thieves Thwarted... By A Manual Gearbox

Alarms, immobilisers and Faraday pouches are all well and good, but when it comes to protecting your ride against thieves, a manual gearbox can be pretty damn effective.

Case in point? A pair of teenagers were arrested in Nashville, Tennessee last week, shortly after abandoning a car they were trying to steal “apparently unable to drive a manual transmission,” local authorities said.

It had been a particularly unsuccessful evening for the teens. At 6.20 PM the pair tried to pull one woman from a vehicle in a multi-storey car park on the Hillsboro Pike, only for the victim to scream and hold down her horn. The perpetrators then ran away.

Undeterred, the two rubbish thieves grasped keys out of the hand of a woman who was walking away from her car in the Kroker car park, giving up only a few seconds after getting in the vehicle thanks to its stick shift configuration.

Local police spotted the teenagers shortly after and promptly arrested them. They have been charged with carjacking, theft of property and attempted vehicle theft at Juvenile Court.