Friends in the motor trade had alerted the Cook Report to an alarming increase in the number of written off vehicles - often poorly rebuilt from several crashed cars - which were being passed off on unsuspecting motorists. The Cook Report found a ‘retired’ cut and shut specialist who boasted that £8 million worth of bodged cars had passed through his hands. For the programme, he produced a Honda hatchback made of the front end of one write-off and the back end of another. It then went for auction, where it was bought by an unsuspecting dealer. At this point, the team stepped in and made sure nobody lost any money. Then it was crash tested at MIRA - the Motor Industry Research Association. To the horror of the testers and the young couple who were thinking of buying it, the immaculate-looking Honda almost fell in half in a 30mph side impact crash. On the road, the occupants would have been seriously injured or killed outright.
The programme also laid a trap for a car stealing gang which specialised in stealing high-value 4 x 4s, changing their identity and selling them on to new owners who would never actually have title to them. The theft of a £25,000 Shogun was secretly filmed and tracked for some months before being recovered, hidden by the thieves in a suburban garage, presumably in the hope that it would eventually be forgotten about. Then it was time to confront the gang’s ringleader, whose only response was to attack Cook and his crew with a baseball bat.
Another avenue the programme pursued was stolen cars being given the identity of a wreck in a process known as ‘ringing’. That too left the new owner of what looked like a cracking low-mileage Peugeot in a legal limbo. The team painstakingly traced the owners of both the wreck and the ringer and the Peugeot-sponsored rally driver who sold it. This kind of crime was on the increase because the money in the business was vast. Back then, the police estimated that it cost the public over £1.3 billion every year.