DataDot

Stolen Vehicle Recovery Boosted By Compulsory Microdotting

As of 1 January 2011, all new vehicles registered in South Africa will have to be fitted with microdots, which will aid vehicle identification numbers (VIN)in tracking stolen vehicles and returning them to their rightful owners.

According to an announcement by the South African Police Service (SAPS), it will be compulsory for microdots to be present on all vehicles registered for the first time in South Africa on or after 1 January 2011; all vehicles which are allocated a new VIN by the SAPS on or after 1 January 2011; and all imported vehicles on or after 1 January 2011.

The Minister of Transport still needs to publish the regulations in terms of the Notional Road Traffic Act to make microdotling compulsory.

Microdots will have to comply with South Africa's new microdotting standard, SANS 534-1. Fouche Burgers, Business Against Crime South Africa (BACSA) project manager and chairperson of the standard writing committee, said that the standard is being revised in anticipation of the publication of the regulation amendments.

It's hoped that compulsory microdotting will make life much more difficult for car thieves.

Currently, VIN and chassis numbers are used to identify vehicles, but these can be filed off and changed, with the result that stolen or hijacked vehicles are soon relicensed under a new identity and end up back on South African roads. This also facilitates the sale of parts and expedites exports to neighbouring countries.

Approximately 50 per cent of stolen and hijacked vehicles which are relicensed in South Africa end up back an the country's roads, 30 per cent are sold for parts and 20 per cent are exported.

Microdot technology allows for 10 000 to 15 000 one square millimetre dots to be applied to 90 different locations on a single vehicle. Each dot carries a microscopic 17-digit laser-etched vehicle identification number to identify vehicles and their owners. The number is visible only under an ultraviolet light and with the aid of a magnifying lens. Even if some dots are effaced, car thieves are never able to remove all of them.

About 90 000 vehicles, to the value of more than R9-billion, are stolen in South Africa each year. More than 12 000 recovered but unidentified vehicles, worth more than R1-billion, are destroyed annually by the SAPS because the legal owners couldn't be located.

BACSA conduded a study on the recovery rate of fully microdotfed vehicle models versus those without microdots. The result was a 91 per cent recovery rate for microdotted models and only 52 per cent for non-microdotted models within the same class.

Microdotting will ensure that more owners ore reunited with their cars, saving them and their insurers a lot of money.