Are there any cars that thieves don’t know how to steal?

I once owned one. This one:

It was a Mercedes Benz 190 SL.

No, it had no anti-theft devices. What made it impossible to steal was this:

*See all those knobs on the dashboard? *They all look the same. And none of them had any labels to indicate what they did. And among them was both a cold start knob and a hot start knob. I had to use one of them to start the car.

Now, few people in those years knew what a manual cold start was, much less how to use it properly. The best American cars had automatic starters since the 1930s. Yes, there were budget cars that had them in the 1960s, but no one expected to find one in an expensive convertible. And NO ONE who didn’t already own one of those cars had any idea what a hot start was, or even that it existed!

Since no one knew how to start it, the car was essentially theft-proof. The problem was that not even the garage attendants knew how to start it. This was a problem at the time because I lived in a place where secure garage parking was a must.

The parking attendants were always too full of themselves to listen to the owner’s warning that the car needed some special procedures to start. In addition to the hot and cold start knobs, the car had a separate start button. Of course, that also had no information written on it. The valet finally admitted, after making me wait, that he couldn’t start the car. And they got angry when I started it on the first try.

Additionally, the Mercedes 190 SL had another feature that could have been used to thwart car thieves. One of those knobs (yes, they were blank again and just like all the others.) allowed the driver to switch between the main and reserve tanks in case you ran low on fuel. If the knob was turned halfway, it cut off fuel from both tanks.