Woodford Car Hire review: Remote disabling without making contact

Woodford Car Hire have a tracking device on their cars, which includes the ability to disable your car remotely. They do not give you any information on this device. Such devices can be hacked, meaning if you hire a car from Woodford you are open to having your car disabled any time, any place. Until Woodford can provide documentation concerning the security of their system, nobody should trust the safety of a car hired from them.

Woodford are also entirely happy to disable your car themselves without making contact. On 18 January I tried to drive my Woodford hire car into Lesotho. There was nothing in my hire contract that said I couldn't. Just outside the border Woodford tried to phone me, but we were inside a restaurant and my phone was taped to the car dashboard for use as a sat nav (GPS), so I didn't receive the calls. Woodford did not leave a voice message, did not send an SMS, did not send an email, and did not try Whatsapp.

What they did do was disable the car when we were at the border, an elderly couple, in 35C weather — and with very poor phone signal (Van Rooyen's gate). My wife and I push started the car ourselves in that heat, to try to get it to a garage to fix. When we were again able to get a signal, we saw the missed phone calls and contacted Woodford. They did not explain that they had disabled the car themselves, they only said we needed extra insurance. It took half an hour, many messages and many attempts at a phone call before they got around to explaining that the car had not broken down, we didn't need to get to a mechanic, they had disabled the car themselves!

I don't think Woodford should be allowed to strand an elderly couple in a remote location without making contact. They did try to phone, but they didn't try anything else — and when we did make contact they were very poor about explaining the situation. I was frantic about the disabled car, and they would only tell me how much more insurance I had to pay.

I think their whole use of this remote disabling technology is open to question. They should provide every customer with details about the technology: how and when it is used, and above all its security against hacking. Nobody wants to drive a car that could be disabled by any clever hacker, anytime, anywhere. Woodford should prove their system is secure.

And Woodford should compensate us for stranding us in that heat in a remote place, without having succeeded in informing us of the situation.