Three cars were torched in one secluded nature reserve carpark in December, after a long history of fires and burnouts, while four cars were set on fire on Christmas Day.

Nearly two cars burned on average every day through the month.

Police have been unable to say why there have been so many cars set on fire, whether investigations are continuing or what might have caused the spate of fires, instead pointing to statistics which show a decline in the average number of car fires each month since July 2016.

Three cars were destroyed in December on Wickens Place, which leads up to the Mt Rogers nature reserve from Fraser.

Tony Baker, whose house backs onto the Wickens Place carpark, said the number of cars set on fire increased every Christmas.

"A couple of weeks ago, there were two cars here at once, which was a bit unusual," he said.

Mr Baker said the more he looked at the carpark, the more scorch marks he could see.

"The whole purpose of stealing a car to take it somewhere to torch it, what's the value in it?"

Lisa Cassidy, whose unit also backs on to the carpark, said it was a hot spot and the regular car fires stressed out her dogs.

Ms Cassidy said nearby residents would like a perimeter to be set up between the carpark and back fences to prevent a grass fire from reaching neighbouring properties.

But the destruction bothered Ms Cassidy the most.

"We see the people coming the day after. The young lady with her two toddlers because all the car seats were in her car, things like that. It's just unsalvageable."

A Holden Commodore was set on fire across the road from Ros and Tony Peacock's Erldunda Circuit house in Hawker just after 2am on Thursday.

The couple watched the car burn under overhanging eucalypts on the edge of a suburban nature reserve, near Hawker College.

"We've seen enough movies to know if there's fuel in the fuel tank, it could explode," Mrs Peacock said.

Mr Peacock, who filmed the fire, said it was the first time a car had been burned on the street and it took firefighters longer than he expected to put the fire out.

A car was set alight on Christmas morning in the carpark at Gold Creek Senior Secondary School in Nicholls, with fire fighters called just before 10am.

Firefighters extinguished a car fire near Pierces Creek at the intersection of Bullock Paddock Road and Vanitys Crossing Road on December 15, about 6 kilometres south west of Uriarra Village.

A spokesman for the Emergency Services Agency said at the time the fire was significant but was contained to an area of 10 metres by 50 metres.

A burnt-out car started a bushfire near Pierces Creek in November that burned out of control over 200 hectares, before being contained 7 kilometres from Kambah.

A Duncan's Plumbing van was set on fire on Friday afternoon in Latham, after it was stolen earlier in the afternon from the loading bay at the Magpies Sports Club in Holt.

The van and its contents were valued up to $70,000, a company staff member said.

The "brazen" theft also destroyed a tradesman's personal tools, meaning he could not attend jobs by himself, she said.

Police said they attended approximately 14 vehicle fires a month since July, which is less than previous years.

An ACT Policing spokesman said in 2016-17 police attended 22 car fires on average every month, and 24 a month in 2017-18.

But ACT Fire and Rescue responded to 291 car fires, including non-suspicious fires, in 2017-18, an increase on the previous two years.

According to the Emergency Services Agency's publicly available incident map, fire fighters attended 56 car fires in December.

Fire fighters were called out to 20 car fires in November and 13 in October.

ACT Fire & Rescue Operational Commander Patrick Brennan said members of the public should provide as much information as possible when they called emergency services and and remain on scene until fire fighters arrived.

"What we need to know first and foremost is the location, and sometimes that can be tricky," he said

An accurate location helped fire fighters allocate resources and quickly extinguish the fires, Mr Brennan said.

"If [a car is] next to something, then the chances of [the fire] spreading is very, very, very high," he said.

While there was not a great risk of "Hollywood explosions", Mr Brennan said it was best to get behind something rather than remain directly in view of the car.

Not all car fires are in abandoned cars, Mr Brennan said.

"They are a fairly frequent incident type for us."

In the year to September, 1107 vehicles were stolen in the ACT, according to statistics released by the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council.

More than half of stolen vehicles are worth less than $5000, while the most commonly stolen car is still the Nissan Pulsar N15, followed by the Ford Falcon BA and the Holden Commodore VE.