Carjacking

Carjacking is a form of hijacking, where the crime is of stealing a motor vehicle and also armed assault when the vehicle is occupied. Historically, such as in the rash of semi-trailer truck hijackings during the 1960s, the general term hijacking was used for that type of vehicle abduction, which did not often include kidnapping of the driver, and concentrated on the theft of the load, rather than the vehicle itself. During the later day car theft crime, typically, the carjacker is armed, and the driver is forced out of the car with the threat of bodily injury. In other rarer cases, the driver is kidnapped under the assault by a weapon and is retained as a passenger under duress, or made to drive his or her abductor. Women are particularly victimized in this latter method.

The word is a portmanteau of car and hijacking. The term was coined by reporter Scott Bowles and EJ Mitchell, an editor with The Detroit News. The News first used the term in an August 28, 1991 report on the murder of Ruth Wahl, a 22-year-old Detroit drugstore cashier who was killed when she would not surrender her Suzuki Sidekick, and in an investigative report examining the rash of what police called at the time "robbery armed unlawful driving away an automobile", plaguing Detroit.