One afternoon last summer, Melanie Morris drove into a Liverpool garage for some petrol after dropping off her boyfriend round the corner. She had to wait a few minutes because the staff were changing shifts, by which time her R-reg Vauxhall Vectra was the only car on the forecourt. 'I put the petrol in, got my purse and closed the door,' she recalls. 'I'd just got in front of the car when this lad came from nowhere, pushed past me and dived into the driving seat.' Unfortunately, as many people do when they're only going to be gone a minute, Morris left the keys inside. 'I froze on the spot,' she says. 'He was revving and revving and I thought, "Oh my God, he's going to run me over". Then I backed off and he screeched out of the garage. I'd only had the car about a week. I stood there shaking. I thought your car got stolen when you weren't there - you know, you come back and it's gone.'
Which is also what City banker Felipe Rein thought. As he parked his lefthand-drive Mercedes SLK near his flat in west London late one evening 18 months ago, he spotted two young men hanging around. 'All of a sudden, in this empty street, I heard the rubbing of nylon trousers just behind me and these two guys jumped on me,' he says. 'I would have given them my underwear if they'd wanted it, but it was instinctive to fight. We all ended up in the road. I started shouting, "What do you want?" One said, "The keys to your car". Then one started closing his arm around my neck. I couldn't breathe, and I collapsed. I woke up - it was probably only a minute later - in the middle of the road with blood all over me.' A stone had got stuck in Rein's head and he needed stitches, while his Merc didn't turn up until last October - in Johannesburg, in the hands of a nightclub bouncer. 'I don't have a car in London anymore; I don't want the worry,' he says.
No figures are available on the number of incidents in Britain like these. However, in the United States there are about 35,000 attempted hijackings each year - in 1997, the state of Louisiana voted to allow its citizens to shoot would-be carjackers on the spot. South Africa, though, is the global hotspot for the crime, despite the comparatively low incidence of vehicle ownership. There were 13,500 carjackings last year, many of them resulting in murder. So endemic is it, that a potentially lethal device can be fitted to cars that blasts a 10ft flame out of the sides if the driver doesn't like the look of anyone who approaches.
Although the problem is still comparatively small beer in the UK, according to police and insurers, snatching vehicles in transit is a growing trend. Norwich Union believes that nicking cars from petrol stations is becoming particularly common. It stems from the introduction of under-the-bonnet security systems on cars - opportunist thieves who can't readily circumvent the technology are opting instead to steal car keys from your tantalisingly placed hook near the front door, or to hop into the driving seat while you've kindly got the engine running.
'I don't want to whip up hysteria, but as security devices get more sophisticated, thieves have to move to the next weakest point - and that's the keys,' says Detective Inspector Mike Barron of Merseyside police force's stolen vehicle wing. 'One side of that is hijacking and sneak thefts. It probably accounts for under 10 per cent of vehicle offences, but a few years ago I'd have said it was under 2 per cent.' Barron's concern is that, while state-of-the-art car alarms are all very well, there's a displacement cost. 'Security brings the volume of car crime down, but the offences that are left are more serious than they've been in the past. With hijacking, the potential for confrontation and physical injury is terrible.'
Insurers are now getting in on the act. 'Worrying trends have developed in other parts of the world, especially South Africa, so we're very concerned about it increasing here,' says Roger Snowden, underwriting manager at Privilege Insurance. He admits that it is now the case that owners of fancy motors will not have full insurance cover without additional car protection, but naturally denies that insurers are talking up the risk of carjacking to fleece motorists. 'High-class cars are being stolen at knife-point and thieves are targeting sets of traffic lights where Aston Martins and Mercedes are going past. And the mentality of the British male means they'd try to fight off an attacker. That will work in some cases, but why bother?'
Why, that is, when you can splash out £200 to foil audacious robbers, then stand back on the pavement safe in the knowledge that your prize possession will conk out on them up the road anyway. Auto-security expert Graeme Frankland has developed just such an anti-hijacking gadget through his company Impact-G (details on 01748 821400). It's a kind of credit card that sends a signal to an aerial in the vehicle to allow you to drive. If an intruder tries to swipe the car they'll get only about half a mile before the motor gradually shuts itself down, sirens sound and the offender is obliged to leg it.
While technology can be the motorist's friend, it can also be an accessory to crime. Thieves who prefer to keep their hands clean have found a nifty way of gaining access to tasty motors. Seven men were jailed in January for their part in a car-theft racket that involved grabbing infra-red signals from car alarms and using the stored codes to collect the vehicles later. One of the tools used by 'mastermind' Sajj Aslam was his £50 Casio wristwatch. He would ask garages in Greater Manchester for a test drive, then secretly copy the alarm code from the car's key-fob using his watch's 'learn' function - it catches the signal when you fire the remote near it. His accomplices would go back later, de-activate the alarm and drive off into the sunset.
Reports of the scam follow the revelation in New Scientist magazine before Christmas that a Danish computer journalist had used his Palm Pilot mini-PC to unlock a car in the same way. Of course, a thief who wanted the car itself and not just its contents would need to be able to get it started. Aslam had also taken impressions of the keys.
The Motor Insurance Repair and Research Centre (MIRRC) scoffs at the suggestion that umpteen British car owners could be swindled in this way. 'The number of criminals capable of using this technology is pretty low and the thief would have to be within 1ft of the car-alarm remote and in the direct line of fire to grab the code,' says Ken Roberts, the centre's director of research.
Not so, says Graeme Frankland. 'With a remote of reasonable quality, if you stand behind the person or even if you're walking past on the footpath, there's a good chance you'd pick up the signal bouncing off the metal parts of the car, though you might not catch it every time.' Despite the MIRRC's claim that code-snatching isn't easy, in order to stamp out the practice, it has insisted that manufacturers install new security systems that have rolling codes which can take decades to repeat. However, there are still thousands of motors on the road using the vulnerable technology - and universal remote controls, which can copy car-alarm signals as well as codes from videos and stereos, are available from any high street gadget shop.
The fact that valuables could be stolen from inside without any sign of forced entry makes an insurance claim tricky - as, in its way, the Association of British Insurers acknowledges. 'There is the potential for fraud,' says a spokesman.
