Car Owner Leaves Hotel and Heads to Parking Lot—Shock at What Awaits

A post about a car owner who found the wheels of their vehicle missing just outside their hotel has gone viral on Reddit.

The scene was captured in an image featured in a post by Reddit user u/a-hipster-doofus in the r/Wellthatsucks subreddit.

The caption shared with the post, which has had 54,000 upvotes since it was uploaded on June 23, simply says: “I came out of my hotel to this…”

The image—which was taken in a suburb of the Swedish capital of Stockholm, the poster noted in a later comment—shows a side view of a car in a parking spot with two tires missing.

In a later comment, the car owner said that the hotel has several security cameras, “but there’s a blind spot where I parked my car. Almost as if they knew.”

The viral post comes as the rate of vehicle theft in the United States was reported to have declined 80 percent between 1990 and 2020, according to a January 2025 study in the Security Journal.

This study, which looked at historical evidence including reports to the U.S. Congress and automobile industry data from the Federal Register, noted that legislation drove security improvements that were fitted to high-risk vehicles from the late 1980s.

The study found that the “theft of vehicles with electronic engine immobilizers declined 80 percent relative to a matched control group and theft of new secure vehicles declined before older vehicles.”

The study concluded that “the electronic engine immobilizer caused the great American car crime decline” and “if this induced declining crime more generally, the electronic engine immobilizer may be the most important crime prevention device of recent history.”

‘That’s Unexpected’

Viewers on Reddit were sympathetic towards the car owner in the viral post.

U/properly_sauced said: “Well, that’s unexpected! A******* everywhere.”

U/Individual_Step5068 simply simply said: “Scumbags,” adding: “that could easily be $5,000 worth of wheels and tires…”

U/OneWholeSoul noted: “I honestly thought this was a thing just from, like, cartoons.” The original poster replied: “Me too!”

“Spend a night in our hotel, and you will no longer be tired,” u/PickTour humorously noted.

U/Venomvinesz added: “Nothing quite like waking up refreshed from a good night’s sleep only to discover your car got undressed while you weren’t looking.”

U/My0wn simply wrote: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Newsweek has contacted the original poster for comment via the Reddit messaging system.