Plagued motorist Peter Bayles prepared a shock for vandals who attacked his car.

The electrician parked his blue P-registration Ford Mondeo outside his house and he wired it up to the mains.

But a neighbour who spotted the cable tipped off the police and he was arrested.

He was charged with setting the engine with intent to destroy human life or to inflict grievous bodily harm.

For two fraught months the doorstep vandals had wrecked a succession of four cars that Bayles,28, bought to use for work.

They smashed windsreens, headlights, bumpers and stole the numberplates.

So he resorted to electrifying the £1,800 Mondeo between 10pm and 6pm as it stood at the back of his terraced house, and he installed a circuit breaker to give them just a short, sharp shock.

Police called in an electrician who reported on the trap, said prosecutor Peter Sabiston. They decided that the vandals were more likely to be harmed from falling over.

Bayles said that the last attack on his car was just three days before.

Tom, MItchell, defending, said:"He has done something which anybody who has ever had a car vandalised or broken into would dream of doing.

"The difference is that he made the dream a reality , and what he has done is wrong.

"If you wire up your car to the mains somebody is going to get a jolt. If it had been somebody with a weak heart or a child he might find himself looking down the barrel of a much more serious charge."

Judge Tony Briggs told Bayles, who is in the process of divorce:"Those who electrify their car so that members of the public might accidentally come into contact with it risk losing their liberty.

"But in the peculiar circumstances of this matter it seems just possible not to send you away for this."

Bayles said later:"I knew what I was doing so I made sure I used the circuit breaker.

"The vandals made my life a misery. I had to keep changing my car because they left it unroadworthy."

Bayles of New Row, Eldon, Bishop Auckland, County Durham, was given 80 hours community punishment and 12 months community rehabilitation yesterday at Teesside Crown Court.

He pleaded guilty to attempted actual bodily harm on December 13 last year. The Crown accepted his Not Guilty pleas to intent to destroy human life and an alternative charge of attempted GBH.