A truck was hijacked. His insurer blamed an expired permit, not the gunmen

A man's delivery truck was hijacked at gunpoint. He lost the vehicle and the load. When he claimed on his insurance, the insurer said no. Not because of the hijacking. Because his Professional Driving Permit had expired months before, even though his ordinary driver's licence was still valid.

The insurer argued that driving without a valid PrDP was illegal, so paying out would reward unlawful conduct. The National Financial Ombud disagreed. Lead ombud Edite Teixeira-Mckinon ruled that the expired permit had nothing to do with why he was hijacked. The ruling, published on 27 February 2025, forced the insurer to settle the claim in full.

That is the pattern behind nearly every disputed hijacking claim in South Africa. The rejection is almost never about the gunmen. It is about a condition the policyholder agreed to years earlier and forgot.

How many cars are being hijacked right now?

South Africa recorded 3,811 carjackings in the first quarter of the 2026/27 police year, April to June 2026, SAPS said when it released the figures on 28 August 2026. Spread across the 91 days of that quarter, that works out to 42 hijackings a day.

The number is actually falling. A year earlier, in the same quarter, SAPS recorded 4,657 carjackings, so this year's figure is down by close to a fifth. Gauteng still carries most of the load, with 2,207 of the national total. The Western Cape logged 548, KwaZulu-Natal 481 (the province where a Pinetown father fired back at gunmen at his own gate in October 2026) and the Eastern Cape 195.

4,657.00Q1 2025/26

3,811.00Q1 2026/27

Q1 2025/26	4,657.00
Q1 2026/27	3,811.00

Source: SAPS Q1 2026/27 crime statistics, released 28 August 2026

Even with the drop, that is thousands of South Africans a year who reach for their insurance policy right after the worst ten minutes of their life. Whether it pays out often comes down to small print nobody read twice.

What actually gets a hijacking claim rejected?

The single biggest reason motor claims get turned down in South Africa right now has nothing to do with hijacking at all. According to the National Financial Ombud's non-life insurance division, claims rejected over driving under the influence rose 67% year on year, now the leading cause of motor claim rejections generally.

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For hijacking and theft specifically, the fights are almost always about the tracker. Nicole Hoolsema is suing Discovery Insure in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria after it refused to pay out when her car was stolen in November 2023. Discovery's reason was that her Crowd Search tracking device was "faulty" and that it had warned her by email beforehand. She says she never received that email and that the device was working. The case was still open as of October 2025.

The other repeat offenders are a driving licence that lapsed years ago, a car used for deliveries or ride-hailing when the policy only covered private use, and a tracker that was fitted but never properly tested. None of those cause a hijacking. All three can cost you the payout.

Photo: -stk / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What does every major insurer's hijacking cover actually say?

All 8 of South Africa's largest motor insurers make a hijacking payout conditional on a tracking device, according to each insurer's own published policy wording, not on how the hijacking happened.

Not one of those eight policies ties cover to how violent the hijacking was, whether a weapon was shown or whether anyone was hurt. Every one of them ties it to a small electronic box under the dashboard that has to have been tested, paid up and switched on.

Is the tracker rule just fine print, or does it actually hold up?

It does hold up, but not automatically in the insurer's favour. A driver insured a Toyota Fortuner and had it stolen. The insurer refused to pay, saying he had broken the minimum security condition by never fitting a tracker. He said nobody had told him it was compulsory or that skipping it would cost him his cover.

The FAIS Ombud sided with him. Simply including the tracker clause somewhere in a policy document was not enough, the ombud found. An insurer has to actively flag conditions like that before the sale, in a way the buyer can actually take in, not bury them in paragraph 14 of an annexure. The insurer settled the claim in full for R644,000.

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That is the thread running through both rulings so far. Insurers can set tough conditions. What they cannot do is spring those conditions on a customer only after the gunmen have already driven off.

Photo: tswedensky / Wikimedia Commons, CC0

What does the ombud actually do when your claim gets rejected?

The National Financial Ombud's non-life insurance division registered 10,054 new complaints in 2025 and resolved 11,428, recovering R82.9 million for consumers, according to figures published in June 2026. Motor insurance made up more than a third of all those complaints. Within motor disputes, accident claims dominate at 7 in 10. Theft and hijacking account for fewer than 1 in 10.

Only about 1 in 9 complaints to the division were resolved fully in the consumer's favour. That is the same ombud scheme that decides who pays when a bank refuses to refund a fraud victim, so the bar for overturning an insurer is not low. But the two hijacking-specific rulings above show it is not impossible either, especially when the insurer's own warning to the customer was unclear or never sent.

So does your insurance actually pay out after a hijacking?

Mostly, yes, when the basics were in order: The tracker was fitted, tested and switched on, the licence was current, and the car was being used the way the policy described. The rejections that make headlines are almost never about whether the hijacking happened. They are about a condition agreed to on page nine of a policy document years before anyone pointed a gun at the driver.

It is the same trick that has shown up elsewhere in household finance, like a bank that once paid an item despite having no funds in the account, then charged a fee for it anyway. The institution finds the line in the contract that lets it avoid paying, and counts on nobody reading that far.

Hoolsema's case against Discovery Insure has not been decided. If a court rules that an insurer must prove it clearly warned a customer before cancelling tracker-linked cover, every policy wording in the table above gets rewritten within the year.