In June, a man posing
as a prospective car buyer hijacked a Howick car salesman, who was left stranded
at the side of the road as the thief made off with the Hilux double-cab. As one
of many such vehicle thefts reported recently, the incident raised a series of
questions on crime and cars. Witness Wheels posed these questions
to the automotive industry.
• Are
Hilux bakkies and Fortuner SUVs stolen more often than other bakkies?
No, said Leon Theron,
general manager of technical services and field operations at Toyota South
Africa.
Theron told Witness Wheels there were more recovered Hilux bakkies in police
pounds than other bakkies simply because the Hilux was South Africa’s
best-selling one-ton bakkie while the Fortuner was the most sold vehicle to
private buyers in SA in the second quarter of this year.
“As a percentage,
fewer Hilux bakkies or Fortuners are stolen than the industry norm for these
makes,” said Theron.
He added this was
because Toyota was constantly working with insurance industry experts at its
Prospecton plant to ensure they block entry points which thieves had used to
disable alarms and start the vehicle.
• Can a Hilux or a
Fortuner be stolen by fiddling around the ventilation inlets with a coat
hanger?
Theron laughed at what
he called an urban legend started by a KZN policeman who saw scratches on a
bonnet. “The fact is, to steal a Hilux or a Fortuner, a thief has to basically
bend open and then take off the bonnet while the alarm is going off.” To fix all
this damage typically costs R60 000, he added.
• Can
a key be coded to steal a Toyota?
Only in the movies,
said Leo Kok, senior manager: corporate communications at Toyota SA, adding that
in real life, coded keys cannot easily be copied nor lost keys replaced without
a lot of red tape. “It takes days to replace lost keys, with Toyota owners
required to supply all the paperwork that proved ownership,” Kok
explained.
• Can
the signal from the tracking device be jammed?
Wolfram Zwecker from
sister paper Beeld reported that a signal-jamming device had been
found on three men who were arrested after they had reportedly stolen a
Volkswagen Polo in Benoni.
Gareth Crocker,
spokesperson for Tracker, said jamming devices had been in circulation for about
a decade, but it was not successful because Tracker “often caught the hijackers
with the equipment in the car”.
Croker said Tracker
had several ways to stop the effect of any jamming device in the area.
Altech Netstar said in
a statement the number of vehicles it recovered remained constantly high, which
shows that jamming devices had no noticeable impact on the signal sent out by
tracking devices.
FOLLOWING the report titled “On crime and cars” in Witness
Wheels, which quotes the tracking companies’ reassurance that
signal-blockers don’t work, Pieter Brits, a manager at a national bread-delivery
company, has cautioned that the company has seen one of its trucks “literally
disappear off the screen as we were watching”.
He said that because the company operates a cash-sale business, the
company suffers on average two truck hijackings a week.
“As we followed the route of [the] stolen truck, it’s signal
disappeared off the screen. It did not take the thieves 10 minutes to block the
signal.”
Brits said that while the thieves may have been a step ahead of the
satellite tracker, they were behind on their intelligence, as they had stolen a
truck that delivered bread to large retailers that do not pay by cash but use
electronic transfers.
“The trucks did not even have a load of loaves. It had only bread
crumbs,” Brits said.
He said it was the first such incident, as the company normally
recovers a stolen truck within an hour using Matrix’s systems. (Published in Tuning you straight)
• Which
vehicles pose the highest security risk?
Buys told Witness Wheels this information remained proprietary, but reassured
us South Africa’s insurance and vehicle manufacturing industries were
co-operating in devising ways to stay one step ahead of the thieves. They used
the Vehicle Security System List, which the local insurance industry had
pioneered to grade the security systems built into all new vehicles.
The system is managed
by an independent party and the latest breaches of any system are passed through
to Saia and Naamsa. The manufacturers then use the information to take any extra
steps required to adapt their security systems where necessary to stay ahead of
the thieves.
• With
vehicles becoming increasingly difficult to steal, are thieves resorting to
hijacking with the driver in the car?
SA Insurance
Association (Saia) motor manager Dawie Buys said while he was aware of this
perception, the insurance association at this stage had no proof to substantiate
it. It was busy investigating it in co-operation with the National Association
of Automobile Manufacturers of SA (Naamsa) and the independent manager of the
Vehicle Security System list.
He added that the last
decade has seen major successes in the battle against thieves, thanks to the
co-operation with Business Against Crime South Africa, the South African
Insurance Crime Bureau, the South African Police Service and Naamsa.
“The SAPS latest crime
report for 2010/2011 (April 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011) confirmed clearly that
although common theft of vehicles and motorbikes have decreased nationwide by
10,1%. the robbery of vehicles had dropped by 23,6% and robbery of trucks by
29,2%.
“The next crime report
for 2011/2012 is due in September 2013 and it would be interesting to see if
this trend continued.”
