WATCH | The night the wheels came off: six stolen while driver slept

It “hurts” your heart.

Truck driver Johan Steyn, 46, woke up to find six wheels had been stolen off his vehicle while he was asleep.

“A man’s heart hurts for all that damage on your truck … If this happens to you once, you become wary, because there are no truck stops on this road.”

Steyn pulled over around 11pm on Wednesday evening on the N12 between Strydenburg  and Hopetown in the Northern Cape. He was en route to pick up corn in Jacobsdal.

“Thursday morning when I woke up, the wheels were gone,” said the driver for Jonckie’s Transport in Oudtshoorn.

“We are truck drivers. We work 22 hours and then we sleep a bit, and then we hit the road again. So the little bit when you sleep, you are fast asleep.”

Steyn said the six wheels cost about R80,000.

Steyn has been a truck driver for 28 years and said the only other problem he had had was years ago, when something was stolen off a trailer.

“Here (the N12) you can still pretty much pull over anywhere and sleep. You don’t encounter any problems, but it looks like these syndicates on the N1 are now moving to the N12,” he said.

“If you sleep in town, the police often chase you away. One of our trucks stopped in Britstown, which is nearby. At midnight, the police came and told the driver he had to leave town. Where must we sleep?”

Steyn said people often considered truck driving to be a lowly job, "but actually we do very important work", he said.