The Day I Blew Up Reddit on Someone Else's Loss
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At ten in the morning, on my way out of my apartment building in South Arlington to walk to Starbucks, I found a brand-new 2027 Toyota RAV4 lying flat on its belly in our parking lot. All four wheels and tires were gone. It still wore its paper plate. Nobody had left it on bricks or milk crates, the small courtesy I remember from the seventies, when a car up on blocks was a trope. This one sat on the asphalt with its rotors and calipers bare, like a turtle whose legs had been taken off. I'd never seen a car left fully on its belly before, and I didn't know what I was looking at. I took a picture and posted it to r/nova under the title "Intentional or unintentional?"
By the time I walked back from Starbucks, the car was gone. Whoever came for it, the owner or a tow truck or the insurance company, I never found out. That was the end of my part in the car's story and the beginning of my part in Reddit's. The post passed 228,000 views on r/nova, and when I shared it with the owners on r/rav4club it picked up another 175,000. The r/nova thread alone drew 199 comments.
The comment sections were a better show than anything I've recorded. Thieves who won't spring for cinder blocks anymore proved the economy is in shambles, and someone pointed out that two-by-fours are like eight dollars now. People recommended curb rash as theft prevention, a claymore on every wheel, and carrying your wheels upstairs every night, which would at least make the car itself harder to steal. One person keeps a realistic rubber snake on the front tire and carries "a snake or two" in each car, having once chased off a gang with a small dried one kept inside a coat. When somebody asked how you even lift a car off its belly, I suggested a spatula, and the thread sent me to Spatula City. I meant it. On the show I made the case for a fish spatula, the long, thin, flexible stainless kind that slides under a flaky fillet without breaking it, scaled up and slipped under a RAV4 and onto a flatbed. I'd picture the rescue if I could, but I have aphantasia, so it exists only as a description. One commenter decided the owner had pulled the wheels on purpose so the repo man couldn't take the car, and I told them they'd come in at an angle I never anticipated. I was having a wonderful time.
Then came the comments that stopped me. "Intentional or unintentional? What the fuck is that supposed to mean," one person wrote. Another asked why the post was tagged as funny and cursed anyone who thought it was, and a third answered in the voice of everybody else in the thread: "Tee hee, look at the victim of a crime whose day is now ruined!" They had a point about my title. I meant it as a real question, and I told the thread I was asking whether the owner had taken the wheels off on purpose, but it read as a wink, and the wink was at the expense of somebody I've never met.
That somebody is the reason the post traveled. Somewhere in or near my building lived a person who had owned a new RAV4 for a matter of days, judging by the temp tag, and who came outside to find it amputated. Every one of those four hundred thousand views was a look at that person's very bad morning. A RAV4 owner said it better than I did: "I can't even imagine how I'd feel if my new car—so new to me it has temporary tags on it—was violated this way."
Violated is the right word, and it's close to the one I reached for on the show. In S11E3: Broken Windows, Missing Wheels, I was arguing with what I heard as Malcolm Gladwell's argument on The Oprah Podcast, that Americans ought to tolerate a certain amount of crime the way many Europeans roll their eyes at a pickpocket and move on. My answer was that having your things taken feels like being defiled. Insurance can pay for four wheels and tires. What it can't pay for is the audacity of a stranger coming into the place where you live and putting their hands on what's yours. I said that into a microphone, and two weeks before that episode came out I had turned exactly that kind of violation into content.
The neighbors told me what the photo couldn't. People who knew the lot on sight said it had been losing wheels for close to a decade, almost always off Toyotas and Hondas, and that the complexes around it had never added cameras or security. Others had seen RAV4s stripped in Old Town Alexandria, at an apartment complex in Courthouse, and in an Arlington parking garage. One explained the economics: Toyota and Honda bolt patterns fit most of the cars on the road, so the wheels are easy to sell. The RAV4 owners identified the car as a Limited and guessed it had lost the 20-inch wheels. Someone in r/rav4club told me a post like mine shows up in the Toyota groups every week, and I had to admit I don't frequent Toyota subreddits.
By the end, both threads had turned into a public service announcement. Buy wheel locks. Keep the key somewhere other than the glove box. If you drive a new RAV4 in Northern Virginia, think about locking lug nuts on all twenty studs, so a thief would need a different socket for every one. That advice is the best thing my post did, and none of it came from me. It came from people who had lost their own wheels, or watched it happen to a neighbor, and who answered a stranger's bad morning with instructions for keeping the next one from happening.
I still don't know whose car it was. If they ever find the photo, I hope they read past the jokes to the wheel-lock threads, because that part of the attention belongs to them. The fish spatula is available to any tow company in Arlington that wants it.
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