Car Tracking and Recovery

Your car, your family's daily location, your insurer's certificate, all on one app and one account. A hardwired tracking device reports live position, ignition events and accident detection to the same TG Mobile login the household already uses for the family fleet. A parent watching a partner's commute, a couple sharing the school run, an insured driver carrying the certificate at renewal, and a control room ready to act when something is genuinely wrong all read the same picture from the same record.

Direct answer

Car tracking and recovery from TG Tracking gives you live GPS visibility on your car, accident and tamper alerts, geofences for the places that matter, and a control room that triggers a national recovery workflow the moment a theft is confirmed. It is built for South African drivers and most major insurers in this country accept it as approved tracking. See Personal solutions for the full personal range, Dashcam Tracking if you want video evidence too, and the broader Vehicle Tracking and Fleet Management page for how cars sit inside our wider platform.

What car tracking and recovery actually does

A hardwired tracking device sits inside your car, draws a small amount of power from the vehicle, and sends its location, speed, ignition status and a few sensor readings every few seconds over a multi-network cellular SIM. The platform turns that stream into something useful: a live map, a trip history, a set of alerts, and a route into our control room when a confirmed theft needs human escalation.

Live location and trip history

Open the TG Mobile app and your car is on the map within a couple of seconds. Tap any past trip and you see the route, the stops, the speeds and the timestamps. That is useful when a delivery driver disputes a no-show, when a teenage driver tells you they were studying at a friend's house, and when an insurer asks for a route reconstruction after an incident.

Tamper, tow and battery alerts

The device knows the difference between you reversing out of the driveway and someone dragging your car onto a tow truck on a residential street at 02:00. It alerts on unauthorised movement, suspected towing, ignition events outside your normal pattern, battery disconnection, and any attempt to physically interfere with the unit. A panic button is built into the app for when you are in the car.

Geofences for the places that matter

Set a circle around home, work, school, your gym, your child's school. The platform pings you on entry and exit. The alerts are optional and silent by default, so you only hear about the events that matter. National border crossings into Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho or Eswatini fire automatically and cannot be turned off, because most insurers require that flag.

Accident detection and post-event evidence

The device's accelerometer flags collisions, harsh braking and severe impact. The platform stores the seconds either side of the event so a reconstruction is possible later. If you carry a dashcam too, the same event triggers the camera to upload the relevant clip.

Stolen vehicle recovery, in plain language

When the platform raises a confirmed theft event, our control room takes over. The agent on duty calls you to verify, opens a recovery ticket, alerts our recovery network in the area where the car is moving, and stays on the line. The vehicle's location streams to the recovery team in real time. SAPS is engaged via the recovery partner where appropriate. If the device has been jammed or the car is in an underground parking garage, the platform queues the last known position and resumes the moment connectivity returns.

Recovery time depends on three things: how quickly the alert is raised, how accurate the location is when the recovery team arrives, and how close a recovery vehicle is to the car at that moment. The faster the alert, the smaller the search area, the better the outcome.

Insurance, which insurers and what to confirm

Most major South African insurers accept TG Tracking devices as approved tracking, and the platform issues the certificate the broker requires for the policy file. Confirm with your broker before installation, because every insurer keeps its own approved list and that list changes.

For more detail on how the platform fits into a private insured vehicle policy, see Private insured vehicle tracking.

Who this is built for

Daily commuters, family households running two or three cars, parents with a teenage driver who has just got their licence, ride-share drivers who want their work vehicle traceable, small business owner-drivers running a single vehicle that needs the same protection as a fleet asset. The hardware is the same in each case. What changes is how the alerts are configured and who sees what inside the TG Mobile app.

If you also own a trailer, a bakkie canopy of tools, a caravan or a motorbike, look at Asset, Hobby and Trailer Tracking and put both products on the same account.

South African context, why this matters here

A tracker built for European driving conditions is not built for the M1 in peak hour, the N3 between Heidelberg and Harrismith in winter fog, or a hijack hot spot off Modderfontein Road on a Sunday evening. We design for those conditions by default. Multi-network SIMs handle the cellular dead zones around tunnels, mountain passes and dense urban areas. The control room is staffed in this country, in our time zone, working with recovery partners that already know the routes a stolen car is most likely to take. Load-shedding is treated as a normal operating condition, not an exception, so the device's backup battery and the platform's caching layer are sized for it.

Frequently asked questions

Put your car on the same account the family already uses

A tracker installed today runs alongside the family's other vehicles and assets on one TG Mobile account. The insurer's certificate is on file, the household has shared visibility, and the platform is ready when it is needed.