Justin Pearce
INSURANCE brokers in Johannesburg are advising clients that drivers of luxury cars such as BMWs run the most serious risk of being hijacked.
BMW South Africa has in turn accused the insurance industry of giving customers inaccurate information about car hijackings and has called on the police to reveal the truth about which cars are the most likely to be hijacked.
Three major insurance companies approached by a Mail & Guardian reporter posing as a customer were unanimous on one point: BMWs are the make of car most likely to be hijacked.
At present, police keep mum about this information, in terms of a “gentlemen’s agreement” with the motor industry. Police representative Faizel Kader said the purpose of the agreement was to avoid the misperceptions which might result if these figures were published in the media. Kader said the police and the motor industry had been concerned that raw data on the numbers of cars hijacked is meaningless unless it is placed in the context of the market share of each brand of car.
But BMW has gone against the flow in the motor industry by calling for the statistics to be made available. “The agreement started innocently, to stop companies from scoring brownie points,” said company representative Chris Moerdyk. “But now there is complete silence from the manufacturers except for BMW.”
Most insurers compile their own statistics on which cars are most frequently hijacked, and this data is factored into the cost of insurance premiums for a particular car. While insurance companies are reluctant to disclose statistics to the media, customers who approach the companies for advice are told that upmarket cars – especially BMWs – carry the greatest risk of being hijacked.
“The insurance industry is working off perceptions, not statistics,” Moerdyk said, arguing that in the absence of police data the insurers had become caught up in a popular perception that drivers of expensive cars were at risk. This perception was created by the fact that big-time hijackings are more likely to make the news than the far more common hijacking of less valuable cars in the townships.
Moerdyk said his company had done its own research on the topic, which indicates that the rates of car theft and hijacking are proportional to the market share of each make of vehicle. The details of these findings are to be released shortly.
Although insurers were unanimous in their opinion that luxury cars were favourite targets, they were divided as to other types of vehicle.
One broker said that the luxury versions of mid-market brands were also a risk – a Volkswagen Golf GTi is more likely to be hijacked than an ordinary Golf, for example. Minibuses are a popular target according to one source, and hijackers are showing an increasing interest in four-wheel-drive vehicles, which are popular north of the Limpopo. Models not more than two years old are the most desirable catches for hijackers. All the insurers acknowledged, however, that no one is entirely safe from
An Automobile Association survey of car hijackings, thefts and break-ins concludes that Toyota drivers constitute 29 percent of car crime victims, and BMW drivers 14 percent, followed by Volkswagen at 13 percent, Mazda at 10 percent, Nissan at eight percent, and Mercedes at seven percent. The AA survey does not take into account market share of the various marques, and is not comprehensive, since it relied on data submitted voluntarily by AA members and respondents to a newspaper advertisement who had been the victims of car crimes.
It does, however, support the insurance industry’s assumption that BMW hijackings constitute a disproportionately large part of the total number of hijackings.