Technical What is the easiest way to get a title?

If you do anything but going through the state of Wisconsin, you stand the chance of going to jail for a nice vacation and no, they do not observe social distancing there. Follow the [sometimes painful] rules of your state. Here's how wisconsin spells vacation...F.E.L.O.N.Y.

 

It's not as bad as it sounds. I did the WI title dance last summer, it was pretty easy and didn't take all that long.

 

That’s why I said you can request the lost tittle, but they might not give it to you. Sometimes folks think they are the owners of the car, but it wasn’t transferred, sometime in the past.






Bones

 

The only LEGAL WAY to title it in another state is to move to the other state.
Some states red flag every title that were generated by certain easy title outfits that charge far more than the bond.

 

Correct I should have watched closer. Sometimes autocorrect pops on when I am on the HAMB andit thinks that it knows what I want to say.

Sorry for the confusion I meant to type SEMA

 

Had to read that one again I thought it read " What is the easiest way to get a little" SORRY

 

I guess I'm better at getting a title.

 

listen to them! we had a case in missouri where a guy's '62 vette was stolen in 1965; he got it back 30 years later because the boob who eventually bought it had accepted a title for a '63 with it. he got caught at the dmv, trying to get the title changed to a '62!

 

Read the Wisconsin FAQs... minimum $2500 bucks for a bond that they hold for five years. Typical government BS... tie up your cash for five years? They run the VIN and can't figure out who the last titled owner was, or can't find them? I guess they're waiting around for the owner to show up...

 

That's not how bonds work. A bond is not a deposit. You purchase a bond at a fraction of its face-value.



If your purchase value is less than $6,000, your bond is $100. Over that, there is a formula that increases the cost that brings it up to a few hundred, up to $25,000. Above $25,000, you need to work with the bond company on the value.

 

I believe the $2500 is the minimum bond amount, not the actual cost of the bond. The state required I get $14,000 bond for my project. The actual cost of the bond was $200 through State Farm insurance.

 

Why is this thread still getting responses? And, why is it every yahoo from BF Egypt needs to comment on the way their state handles it? The correct (& legal) procedure was posted for the PO. End of story. If he wants to buy a title on eBay, let him. It's cheaper to do it the proper way, than to spend $400 on a piece of paper from a different state & take the chance of committing a felony. Still, it's his choice. Is everybody THAT bored lately?

 

A lot of states have bonded titles. Here in Texas getting one is easy

 

I filed a mechanics lein on one of mine and the State of I
ndiana issued me a new title

 

seems right to me. i had a problem with a title and the dmv ran its history back to the louisville factory while i waited!

 

What if you don't have a VIN#? Then you apply for a new one. Easy. Except that your new number is for a 2020 whatever. Then you need a state police inspection for compliance, like all the other 2020 cars. You running air bags, ABS, catalytic converters, and all the other current crap on your model A? If not, you are S.O.L.! So you buy a title, or install a piece of old frame with a serial number.

I called a guy on Craigslist the other day. He wanted $200 for a crappy old model A frame. I asked if it had a serial number. He called me a dumbass, and said if it had a number the price would have been $2200!

 

That depends on the state

In California, the state everyone loves to hate, all you need to do is have a receipt written out for each major item, thus indicating how you acquired it, and then have it inspected.

Our program allows it to be titled as what it appears, and for that reason, the vehicle need have no more safety, or emissions equipment than it would have left the factory with, which, in the case of the cars on this board, is almost none.

You get a new VIN, issued by the state, and a fresh title.

Most of our inspectors don't really even give a crap about fenders, running boards, or bumpers, either. This is more of a "not built from stolen parts" check, than anything else.

That's the only inspection, too, ever, as we have no others, for non-emissions controlled (1976-newer) vehicles, and then, it's just smog check.

I see bumper-less, fender-less, hood-less, even windshield-less, cars on the road here, every nice day, and even some not so nice ones.

 

The EASIEST way is to get one from the seller when you buy the car. After that, it obviously (from this thread and all the others like it) depends on your state's laws and your tolerance for bureaucratic rigamarole. @gimpyshotrods you are a wealth of information and a paragon of patience.

 

You ought to live in Massachusetts...………………….Spanish Inquisition!

 

I really am trying to help everyone stay safe and legal, and protect our hobby in the process.

It would appear that some of the "rebels" here would rather risk their car, their freedom, and the whole lot of us, and our collective passions, to avoid filling out a little paperwork, and spending an extra $100, give-or-take.

All wile bashing me, and my state, in the process.

As we say out this way: hella charming.

I do have to ask three things of them, though:

If all y'all'er wanting to engage in behavior that is a functional duplicate of what a criminal would do, to take your car from you, and re-title it, when there exists a fully-legal mechanism (sometimes more than one) to achieve your goal, why are you really doing it?

Do you think that the conditions should actually exist that would allow someone to put your property through what we like to call an "involuntary change of ownership", because those same conditions make things convenient for you to paper your ride?

Or, are you that aforementioned criminal?

I wonder how many of the vehicles that are stolen in the US, every year, and are listed as "never recovered", are still driving around out there, with fake paperwork.

When you pick your hill to die on, please make sure that it is not a big pile of stupid.

 

All of this crap would go away and things would be easy, if you could just go to your states DMV and show them a car/vehicle, they check the numbers, to verify that it is not stolen. And bring up/make a title, collect their fee and everybody is happy! But that , I guess is too simple. Most of the time the DMV wants papers that you cannot provide, therefore everything stalls! You are there with the car, you say it’s yours, you provide ID. If something comes up with the car, they have your info. It then can be sorted out. That , I guess is what some states have that is called a bonded title. I don’t think Oklahoma has that.
I’ve got many vehicles that I have owned....or possessed, for years, some of them for over fifty years. A lot don’t have titles. If there was a problem with any of them, I’m sure it would have come up in fifty years! Most folks involved with them are probably dead, now. If you could take a old vehile up to the DMV and they would say “ let see what we can do to help you” instead of gripping at you and telling you you need tons of papers and then indicate your a thief and crook, maybe things would work out. That’s the reason some folks cut corners. I know I have!








Bones

 

They check the numbers? How? On the computer? Just pull it up?

You do realize how many millions of cars have been registered since the beginning of time? There is no way that some state would have all those numbers in their gigantic computer system, along with the info of the current owner. And even if they did, there would have to be a national clearing house that distributes all the info of stolen cars to every DMV office in the Country.

If we paid an extra thousand dollars per title transfer it still wouldn't pay for doing all this digitizing.

 

It happens every time this topic comes up, doesn't it? I think a lot of people don't take the time to read previous responses to see if the question has already been answered.

 

You can sell,trade,give away a car with a bonded title in Minnesota. Have done it. The thing most don't seem to get is that if it's a project car chances are the dang thing isn't going to be finished by the time the bond comes off.
The OP has a chance to trade. The only difference there is if the guy he is trading with thinks he will be driving the car before the bond comes off.

 

That's your state.

I can get in, and out of my favorite DMV (except during the REAL ID rush), titling and registering a vehicle that was out-of-the-system, with fresh plates, in under 30-minutes, helped by some of the nicest state employees that I have met. If I want year-of-manufacture plates, it adds a whole 10-extra minutes.

I gave a customer a ride there, to title and register her vintage motorcycle, and we were in, and out, in 12-minutes, on a Saturday. The title came in in 5-business days.

The only thing that takes a little extra time, outside of that, is getting a cop to look at the numbers, as I cannot verify my own numbers, as that would be a conflict-of-interest.

 

You are a little off.

California has upgraded to a computer system that has no theoretical maximum for storage expansion.

They previously deleted records after 5-years of inactivity. Going forward, they will no longer be doing that.

There are currently over 32,000,000 registered vehicles in this state. All of those will remain in the system, in perpetuity, and those records can be polled by other states, in seconds.

As systems break down, and fail, they will be replaced. At this point, nobody makes technology with the limits that you describe.

The U.S. Department of Justice already maintains what you refer to as a "clearing house", and has, since 1996! No records have been deleted from it, since then.

"On October 25, 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the Anti Car Theft Act, which he called “absolutely critical if we are to strike back against auto thieves…”

"The act calls for the creation and use of the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System (NMVTIS) to stop title fraud; vehicle export inspections to look for stolen vehicles; stiffer penalties for car thieves and chop shop operators; and made carjacking a federal crime.

The U.S. Department of Justice took over the motor vehicle database system in 1996. All states are required to send title information for automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles over a certain age to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA). AAMVA is the administrator of the NMVTIS system.

NMVTIS protects consumers from fraud and unsafe vehicles and helps keep stolen vehicles from being resold.

In addition to most states reporting their title information to AAMVA, auto recyclers, junk yards, salvage yards, insurance companies, and towing operators that take possession of junk/salvage vehicles, must submit monthly reports to NMVTIS."

That database is accessible by most, if not all states, at the speed-of-the-internet, after a few keystrokes, or mouse-clicks.

Oh, and digitizing is automated, and is most often done by third-party contract services, at very little cost.

What you guys seem to not know already exists, is staggering.

 

To clear up some misconceptions about what the modern state of computer systems and data storage are, and to get you up-to-speed:

One page of text is about 4 kilobytes of storage. Let's be generous and call a full DMV title record 10-pages (probably way shorter). That's 40 kilobytes. 25 DMV records is 1 megabyte. 25,000 DMV records is 1 gigabyte. 25,000,000 DMV records is 1 terabyte.

To put this into perspective, the laptop that I am typing this on has two solid state disc drives. The larger of the two is 2 terabytes. That drive cost me $229.99. Yup, free delivery, too, and it can hold 50,000,000 DMV records (18-million more than all active records in CA).

Across the room is my house server. It has a RAID-6 array that has a usable capacity of 16TB. I have about $3,200.00 in that. I can access its contents from anywhere on the globe, over the internet, on my phone, or the car radio.

That's a whopping 400,000,000 potential records! There are only about 300,000,000 actively registered vehicles in the US.

Granted, none of these are "commercial grade" pieces, but even at three-times the price, data storage hardware is not expensive, at-all.

The first row of data storage racks in out on-site data center at work, could reasonably hold every single DMV record, for every single vehicle ever sold in the US, from vehicle number one, and not be full.

 

There is a computer in the Ncic, that has all the stolen numbers in the US. Easy to access if you have the rights. I use to do it back in 1974/5 on a teletype. Kind of an antique computer.
My rant was, that it could be easier to get an old car or project titled. Leave the car thieves to the police. I myself have never had any problems with my DMV as I try to have all my papers in order, or close. I have just heard of problems other folks have with the DMVs. I have friends with used car license that have helped me. The owner of our tag office is a good friend of mine as is one of the clerks. I usually have no problems and pick my time when I go to the tag office. But it could be easier for honest people to get an old heap on the highway.








Bones

 

Obviously you guys have more knowledge of DMV computers than I do. I've only talked with my County Treasurer, who does all the title transfers in my area.

They do not have a huge database of old serial and VINs. And they are not going to be scanning in or even entering just the serial numbers into any database. They barely have time to keep up with current documents (land titles are way more valuable and important than cars) to even think about entering old stuff that hasn't been registered in 50 years. I guess I just have it easy here in Iowa. Not saying I'm trying to cheat the system, I just think the system is not as complex as it is in other states.

Every old title I've taken in to be transferred has just gone through like butter. Never any hint of trouble. And the time I did a bonded title on a pile of parts the inspector gave me a completed form to go get my actual title and registration, no more inspection needed after assembly. It's probably cause we're all just "Iowa nice".

 

WHAT IS THE EASIEST WAY TO GET A TITLE?


Run for a public office and win the election. Poof! YOU now have a "title"...














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