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With a 60-litre tank now costing £80 to fill, many garage owners are
installing "stinger" devices to puncture the tyres of drivers who
try to leave the forecourt without paying.
The Drivestop device has a sensor which detects when a driver is pulling away
without paying. The cashier triggers the system which starts with a
loudspeaker warning to the driver that his tyres will be shredded. If the
warning is ignored, a set of metal spikes springs up and punctures the rear
wheels, deflating them in 10 seconds.
The Drivestop, which costs £10,000, also leaves a tag with a unique
identification number embedded in the rubber, which enables police to link
the vehicle with the theft.
The device's inventor, Jaginder Mudhar, said: "Those in the forecourts
industry and the police are saying drive-aways, or bilking as they sometimes
call it, is on the increase.
"In some parts of the country, there are reports of people queuing up to
drive off. In some cases, you get three or four drive-aways a day."
Mr Mudhar's family-owned petrol station was almost driven out of business by
drive-aways and his device has been installed on 10 forecourts from
Yorkshire to London so far. Four more are planned.
Mukesh Patel, who owns a petrol station near Finsbury Park, north London,
installed the system last month after losing more than £5,000 in drive-away
thefts.
He said: "More people are attempting it with the high cost of fuel and we
have been getting at least one a week. Since the notices about the spikes
went up last month, there haven't been any."
Only one attempt has been made to drive over the spikes, in New Eltham,
south-east London. The thief drove 100 yards on punctured tyres before
abandoning the car, which turned out to have been stolen. The Petrol
Retailers' Association said drive-aways cost the industry more than
£11million in 2006.
PetrolWorld 240508
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