The Department of Motor Vehicles is the one facility that people dislike visiting perhaps even more than their dentist. Few enjoy waiting in a long line just to find out they didn’t bring the right document to register their car or update their license [Ed note: Do you enjoy this? We want to hear from you! – Pete]. And somehow, the driver’s license camera never gets your good side. Let’s talk about your worst day at the DMV: Have you ever bought a car that the DMV refused to register?
Now, some of our lovely readers are probably getting ready to point out that the DMV isn’t always known as the DMV. Indeed, some states get all fancy with it and trade “Department” for “Bureau” or “Registry,” or just call it something different entirely. Still, the concept is basically the same. If you buy a car, change your name, or move, a trip to the DMV is in order.
Most of the time, my DMV trips reach completion without any sort of hiccup. I walk in, present a signed title to a car I want to register, brandish a check to pay for taxes, and leave with a license plate and the feeling that, gee, I wish I didn’t have to pay $416 to register a car I bought for $1,000.
But there is one car that, no matter how many times I visited the DMV, I couldn’t walk out with license plates. That car is my 2012 Volkswagen Jetta SportWagen TDI. I bought this car in early 2020, while I was still relatively fresh to buying used cars on Facebook and Craigslist.
Tomorrow, I will write a story about how I finally triumphed in transferring the title to this car, so I’ll keep it short for this Autopian Asks. Due to a problem with the title that I did not notice when I bought the car, Illinois wouldn’t touch it. I went to over a half-dozen DMVs and all of them turned me away. I even went to some currency exchange stores, which Illinois allows to do basic DMV work, and none of them would touch the title.
Vermont, which still had its famous loophole going, wasn’t willing to transfer the title either, but, confusingly, did give me a registration. So, I sort of ignored the issue until about last fall when I decided that I wanted to sell the car. It took me the entire summer, but I finally triumphed.
Amusingly, a part of me now doesn’t want to sell the Volkswagen after finally beating the title issue. I might just drive the car for a few months, enjoy my win, and then sell it.
The one other time I almost found the wrong end of the DMV was when I turned in a title for a 2005 Volkswagen Passat TDI wagon that the seller signed in the wrong place. Thankfully, the seller had one of those nifty eraser pens, so he corrected the issue. The DMV worker saw the faint remnants of the seller’s old signature and was about to deny me, and then the system crashed. Apparently, this was such a big deal that the worker just put the application through anyway, and sent me on my way with license plates.
How about you? Have you ever gone to the DMV to register a car only to be turned away? What was the trouble?
Top graphic image: Volkswagen
I bought a ’73 Saab 96 that the DMV wouldn’t register because it had changed hands several times but not properly re-registed/re-titled. So when I was trying to register and title it as owner six (or something like that) and everything said I was buying it from owner five, the DMV said that’s no good because owner number two was the last one to own it.
Luckily I was able to track down owner number two, who was only ~45 minutes away, despite ~30 years going by.
Unluckily owner number two had become the type of person to tape magazines and newspapers over all the windows, have a weird network of bailing wire running across the ceiling, and other weird stuff.
Luckily I know this because he finally relented in signing the paperwork to transfer ownership to me and he ended up being quite pleasant about the whole thing. He was just worried I would kill myself because he got rid of it in the early ’80s because the front shock towers had rusted out and he was tired of his feet getting wet in the rain.
Not technically, but way back when you stood in line at the DMV (and had a 50/50 chance of being told you were in the wrong line) I walked up with my paperwork, and she told me with zero drama “this car is stolen”. Guess it happens a lot because she just said “next!” and the state trooper behind her couldn’t have cared less.
I had to drive to the podunk police department that took the original report and have them take it off the “system”, which probably involved a telegram and pigeons.
I bought an Evo 9 that had the seller’s name under an LLC, so that created a lot of problems with AAA. As unpopular as this opinion may be, for niche cases, CA DMV can be better(albeit longer waits) than going to AAA.
The only time I recall ever getting denied at the DMV was when neither the seller nor myself realized that the title to the ’99 V70XC I had just bought from him was in both his and his wife’s names – only he had signed the title over. I learned my lesson about paying closer attention to titles on that one, as it necessitated a 3-hour round trip to meet up with the seller and have his wife sign.
My neighbor posted a for sale sign on their 1999 V70.
My kids were toddlers and I had a tiny commuter car that barely fit their car seats – a 2-door 1996 Tercel (the last car sold in America with a 4-on-the-floor!).
We couldn’t register the car until it passed smog, but the ECU wouldn’t reset after the battery had been replaced.
The service manager for one of the local Volvo dealers also lived in the neighborhood.
He said that he could get it to reset if he drove it to work for a week, that it usually took up to 100 miles of highway and city driving to relearn the settings for fuel injection, idle speed, etc., but he could never get it to reset.
Over the next month, despite driving the crap out of it, taking it up into the local mountains, letting it idle, driving it slow and fast, it still wouldn’t reset.
After driving this car that couldn’t be registered for a few weeks and having several smog checks done, I spent 4 hours on the phone with the CA DMV seeing how to resolve the situation.
Finally they transferred me to someone who knew what I was talking about and they told me that this was a known issue on some early OBD-II cars, that my car was on the “BAR-97 EIS Vehicles of Interest (OBD)” list for “monitors difficult to complete” because “EIS ignores readiness status” and that I could go to the smog judge.
I got an appointment to go to the auto shop at a local community college, they charged me like $8 and hooked it up to the tailpipe sniffer, ran it on the dyno, and told me that the car’s emissions were fine, but the ECU just would not reset to “ready”.
I loved that car, it was safe and roomy and comfortable, but it was a money pit.
Over the next few years, the ECU and wiring harness needed to be replaced, the radiator exploded, every few months there would be another 4-figure repair bill at either the dealer or the local specialty shop.
Nothing quite like the problems Mercedes describes, but when I moved to Tennessee, the DMV didn’t want to send a request to the bank that held the title on my Civic Hybrid that I hadn’t fully paid off. The bank claimed that the state had to request it and wouldn’t send it preemptively. The state gave me a plate the first year, but when I went to renew it was a mess again with both sides claiming the other had to make the first move. I don’t know who backed down, but eventually one side or the other conceded, because I did get registration and after paying off the car I did get the title (and then like a year later someone ran into me and totaled it of course!).
Not my car but Michigan refused to register a kei truck my friend got as a trade. They gave him the usual song and dance about how it’s a mini truck and it’s not legal for on road use and the 25 year law doesn’t matter in this case. He eventually ended up trading it to someone else who had a few acres and was only going to use it on his property.
The interesting part is that this was almost a full year before people started getting letters revoking their registrations and Mercedes wrote her article about it. Even back then they were telling him that the rules changed and they don’t title those anymore but I guess some were slipping though the cracks for quite a few months after then.
I learned a lot about the title transfer process when I bought a motorcycle that had a title, but two things wrong with it.
First the seller had never transferred the title to herself, and I made the mistake of having her sign it anyway.
Second was that the VIN had a digit that was one number off.
So I needed a bonded title and a visit from a sheriff’s deputy to inspect it to confirm nothing looks fishy, and had multiple visits to the DMV through it all. They were able to track it and confirmed the digit was misprinted back in 1983 at the time of the original title issuance and nobody has caught/fixed it since then. Very annoying, but very educational.
Thank goodness for the Auto Club of Southern California. So many more locations and more pleasant to deal with. For basic sales transactions, it’s common for the buyer and seller to meet at the Auto Club to sign the paperwork. Don’t forget to release liability too. My mom sold our RV. The title was in my dad’s name and he had passed away. She was able to bring in a death certificate and apply for a new title at Auto Club; it took a couple of weeks to receive the new title in the mail. I bought a 1989 Mercedes convertible from out of state, and it did have to be inspected at the actual DMV. Other than business related to driver’s licenses and Real ID, we can do a lot through AAA.
i have never had a car I couldn’t register and obtain title to eventually, but I’ve been turned away twice and had a close call on a third occasion.
One was a car I bought from a very small used car dealer that never transferred title to their name. They gave me a bill of sale and an unsigned out of state title from the previous owner. I was 18 at the time and too stupid to know this was problematic. When I went back to the dealer he seemed surprised I had any issues. He was able to get the previous owner to sign the title and titled it in the dealership’s name after a few days, so the problem worked itself out. I don’t think he was shady as much as stupid given his willingness to sort this out. Of course, I have no way of confirming the dealer didn’t forge the previous owner’s signature, so maybe they were shady?
The second was a car I bought from a consignment dealer. Seller had lost the original title and obtained a duplicate at some point during his ownership. He then lost the duplicate but found the original which was given to me in the sale. Unfortunately, the duplicate invalidated the original. This wasn’t a huge deal aside from the fact that seller was undergoing a major surgery (i.e. the kind where survival isn’t guaranteed) the day I found out the title wasn’t valid. Fortunately things went well for him. When he got out of the hospital a few weeks later he obtained a new duplicate which he sent to me.
Third time I wasn’t actually turned away, but it did take a few hours to sort out. The problem was seller was well-organized and had the original paper title from when he bought it in the late ’70s (I bought the car earlier this year). The car hadn’t been registered in decades so the DMV was unable to verify it in their records despite their website listing the title as active and valid (I am paranoid about title issues based on past experiences so I checked this before buying the car). There was also some question about whether a lien from the ’70s was ever released. The lien was from a bank that no longer exists, so that would have been fun to sort out. After three hours and discussions from multiple supervisors they finally issued me a new title. It had me nervous, though, given my previous experiences.
Also, this isn’t a title issue but a weird documentation problem that came up with a motorcycle I owned. I bought it new from a dealer in cash and title was in my name, so it was undisputed that I owned the bike. However, at every insurance renewal my agent contacted me for a photograph of the VIN. Apparently when they submitted my insurance info to a state database they got an error that the VIN and the motorcycle do not exist. I had this happen in two states, which is particularly odd. I have no idea what caused this but I sold the bike last year so it is no longer my problem.
Never had an issue transferring title or registering a car but after going to 3 Harbor Freight stores to find the trailer which the website assured both the sales rep and I where in stock at each location they proceeded to stamp and sign the sale paperwork incorrectly. Of course I didn’t realize this until spending over an hour at the MVC. Luckily it was early enough in the day I was able to do the round trip to have a HF manager fix the paperwork and get back in line at the MVC and get my plates so it could have been worse but what should have been a 30 minute task ended up taking most of the day.
Boy, we had a hell of a time trying to register the ’94 Autozam Scrum we’d bought for the ’24 Lemons Rally up here in New England…
Rhode Island, where 1/3 of our team lived, was one of the first to ban kei cars, so it was out from the get-go. However, the 2/3 of our team which lived in Massachusetts figured we could try there, and it arrived from the seller for registration pretty much to the day that they started refusing to register them at the RMV. Shopped around to like 3 of ’em and got bounced from each of one.
Ended up going through Montana, at great expense and effort and only just barely making it by the rally start date, which was coincidentally right around the time MA started allowing kei car registrations again!
Couldn’t have planned the timing worse if we’d tried!