About 20 000 stolen — but recovered — cars worth an estimated R2-billion are needlessly crushed in South Africa every year. Many are in poor condition, but some are top of their range and in excellent nick.
The cars destroyed are those recovered by authorities, but not reclaimed by their owners, usually because they have been paid out the full insurance value.
One major insurer, which did not want to be identified, said that each year its books showed cars worth R300-million being crushed because they were not reclaimed. “It is a big problem for us,” an executive of the company said.
Recovered cars countrywide are taken to 53 pounds. Owners are given 30 days to reclaim their vehicles and if they don’t the vehicles are crushed.
One pound in Benoni, which the Mail & Guardian visited earlier this month, had 4 000 dust-filled cars standing in the sun in what looked like a car graveyard. Some were stapled together and others squashed up against one another in the muddy grass. On each windscreen there were numbers written in white. About 1 000 cars were crushed at the pound the past month.
Cars waiting to be crushed included a truck worth more than R500 000. It, with others waiting to be put into a giant crusher, had a large red circle painted on its windscreen.
The SAPS said about 90 000 cars worth about R4,9-billion are stolen annually. Insurance companies say about 20% of all insured vehicles are recovered, but only about a third of the vehicles on the road are insured.
DataDot Technology, a company that specialises in marking cars so that they can be easily identified if they are stolen, said about 20 000 recovered cars are crushed.
DataDot’s Dereck Menday said owners often do not claim their cars because it is not possible to identify who the legitimate owner is. This is because the identification markings are altered by the car thieves. Insurance companies said insufficient SAPS staffing also leads to recovered cars remaining unclaimed.
Owners are sometimes too traumatised to want their car back if it was stolen in a hijacking. If the insurance company has paid out the car owner, it is the property of the insurance company and has no value to the previous owner.
Insurance companies said they find it difficult to track down the owners and sometimes have to incur considerable expense to identify the person.
“The amount of cars stolen in South Africa has definitely got a huge influence on car premiums set up by insurance companies,” said Theuns Hotzhausen, owner of Savri (South African Vehicle Recovery and Investigation), an independent vehicle recovering body.
“Every time your car is stolen your insurance company increases your premium. The large amount of cars not recovered in South Africa also influences premium because insurance companies are not getting a return on their investment,” he said.
A smaller insurance company said it lost R17,5-million last year in cars not recovered. Every month a car stands in a pound, the car loses 3% to 8% of its value. That is if the car is not crushed.
“The client has nothing to gain for going out of his or her way to identify the car because it does not belong to him or her anymore, it belongs to us.
“We can’t take the recovered car if it has not been identified and there is nothing we can do to force people to go and identify stolen vehicles,” said an official at the company.
“Before the car is squashed no parts are removed,” said Pieter de Waal, investigator at Savri. “No distinction is made between a C-Class Mercedes and a car worth R20 000.”
A leading South African scrap metal company, which buys compressed cars directly from the South African Police Service, said it buys the cars for between R400 and R600 a ton.
A heavy-duty machine, which costs R4 000 a day to rent, is needed to crush the cars. It takes 15 minutes to crush a car into blocks of 1,5m2 x 1,2m2. The crushing process usually takes place every two months.
But recovered cars have not always been compressed, said Holtzhausen.
“Recovered cars used to be sold at police auctions years ago, but this opened a gap for car syndicates. The syndicates bought cheap cars and used the paperwork to legalise stolen cars.
“To fight corruption police had to put an end to selling these cars and started squashing them,” said Holtzhausen.
He said that if the parts are sold separately a lot of money could be generated for the state and the money could be ploughed back into fighting crime, for example.
The real victims, said Menday, are the ordinary citizens of South Africa, “the ones who can’t afford insurance and are losing their entire life savings once their cars are stolen.”
Not origami
Car syndicates often clone cars or register “paper cars”. Cars sold at police auctions in the past created a perfect loophole for syndicates to register cars illegitimately.
A “paper car” exists only on paper. The car thief identifies a wrecked car at a scrap yard or auction, buys the car for very little money and registers the car on the wrecked car’s papers, says South African Vehicle Recovery and Investigation (Savri).
Another way in which stolen vehicles are kept on the road in South Africa is by cloning cars. Thieves clone cars by writing down any car’s engine, chassis and licence number.
The person then goes to the licensing office with a fake ID and licence, claiming that he lost his car’s registration papers. For R400 he replaces the car registration’s papers.
The person whose car was cloned often finds out only months later. Recent statistics released by the Tswane Metro Police indicate that there are 22 000 cloned cars in Pretoria alone.
Of the eight million vehicles on the country’s roads, an estimated 100 000 are believed to be cloned, according to the South African Road Traffic Management Corporation.
After a car is stolen the thieves simply change one digit from the chassis number or engine number, often with the help of someone at the licensing office. — Surika van Schalkwyk