Australian insurer QBE is teaming up with the Victorian police to combat increasing car thefts with the use of a real-time tracking technology.
QBE is using black box-style in-car technology that can track stolen vehicles, which helps authorities not only recover the vehicles but also apprehend the perpetrators.
“To date, all cars stolen with our insurance box device fitted have been recovered successfully,” a QBE spokesman told the Sunday Herald Sun.
Insurance Box, a vehicle telematics gadget that was originally marketed to help good drivers get lower premiums, allows QBE to track a moving stolen vehicle in real-time and inform the authorities of its movements.
One case saw the police track a $25,000 Holden Captiva to where it had stopped on Elgar Rd, Derrimut, hours after it was stolen from a Sunshine driveway.
Another incident saw a Toyota Camry stolen from a St Kilda apartment complex recovered in Collingwood the same morning.
The new partnership comes at a time when there has been a surge of car thefts spurred by youth crime, according to the Herald Sun.
According to Victoria Police data, there was a 20% spike in car thefts over a five-year period last year, and 90% of those statistics involved young repeat offenders.
Join the conversation