Good work. I deliberately avoided making any conclusions though, other than to say statistics are ********.
What I wanted to do was debunk the notion that S3's are simply disappearing off driveways at a rate that Audi can barely keep up with and that would make buying one a futile exercise. It's not, and the issue isn't as bad as the headlines are making out.
The use of thefts per thousand vehicles really doesn't work either when comparing these two particular cars. But not for reasons that immediately obvious. The stats are likely to be heavily biased in favour of the Defender due to some key differences. The S3 is a modern hot hatch, around in 3 basic variants over the last 16 years. The Defender is something else entirely since its been in production (as "Defender") for about 25 years, rather longer than the S3, and it currently it spans a great many fields of interest. Not only is it a private vehicle just the same as an S3, but it's also a commercial vehicle, a special fit vehicle, an emergency vehicle, a military vehicle, an amateur competition vehicle, a farm vehicle, an appreciating classic car, a fashion trend, and a national icon that you can break into with a wet five pound note.
Having 'operated' defenders (I hesitate to use the term 'driven') I've experienced first hand their propensity to rust, have lumps fall off, breakdown a lot, and still manage to get an MOT despite being completely and utterly shagged out, before ending up as piles of tragic iron oxide and aluminium gathering dust and cobwebs in the backs of barns while their owners buy something reliable and Japanese. I have no stats to back it up, but I can speculate with some degree of confidence that when compared with the Defender, a much greater proportion of the S3's on the DVLAs records are still used on the road and aren't held together with duct tape, bailing wire and jubilee clips, and are not riddled with holes, dents and cowshit. I can also confidently predict that a vastly higher proportion of defenders actually on the road are in such poor condition that you'd actually be doing the owner a favour if you stole it. Hence the thefts per 1000 vehicles statistic doesn't work, and a thefts per 1000 vehicles that are actually worth stealing stat might be more useful instead. Let's face it, no ones stealing G reg jalopy junk heap land rovers here, the only ones going missing late at night that we need concern ourselves with are the later ones that are still shiny, haven't fallen to bits yet, and can still be broken or moved on for decent money. These ones are a much smaller proportion of the 106,000 still on the books.