Question: What Is Your Most Kafkaesque Car-Registration Experience?
As I gather parts for my 1941 Plymouth sedan road-racer project, I’ve also been slogging my way through the bureaucratic obstacle course that is registering a title-less car that spent 45 years sitting in a Colorado high desert field. I’ve lived in three states during my car-owning years: California, Georgia, and Colorado. Each is what I call a Front License Plate State (FLPS), meaning car-registration procedures are less informal than what you get in states that issue only rear license plates, and so my car-registering experience features many episodes that might have been scripted by this guy. In a FLPS, you will find yourself shunted down numerous tail-chasing infinite loops when attempting to, say, get license plates for a ’58 DKW on a ’70 Ford Courier frame that you bought from a mysterious out-of-state guy who then became the Antarctic Consul for Lesotho. My search for a ’41 Plymouth title has (so far) involved a title search, a lien search, a certified VIN verification (not to be confused with a regular VIN verification; the certified type may be performed only at the office of one of four authorized police departments in Colorado), an appraisal by a registered Colorado car dealer, a surety bond for twice the appraised value, and a dozen lengthy trips to my local DMV… and, compared to some of my California experiences, this is easy. How about you?
Note that we’re not talking about Kafkaesque traffic ticket experiences here; that will be the subject of a future Question of the Day. Share your most nightmarish title/plate/tags-obtainment experiences with us. Those of you who live in flag-of-convenience states or countries can go ahead and gloat at the rest of us. If you haven’t read The Trial yet, you’re in luck— it’s available for free on the Gutenberg Project’s site!
But when K. had the confidence to try and do all this the difficulty of composing the documents was too much for him. Earlier, just a week or so before, he could only have felt shame at the thought of being made to write out such documents himself; it had never entered his head that the task could also be difficult. He remembered one morning when, already piled up with work, he suddenly shoved everything to one side and took a pad of paper on which he sketched out some of his thoughts on how documents of this sort should proceed. Perhaps he would offer them to that slow-witted lawyer, but just then the door of the manager’s office opened and the deputy-director entered the room with a loud laugh. K. was very embarrassed, although the deputy-director, of course, was not laughing at K.’s documents, which he knew nothing about, but at a joke he had just heard about the stock-exchange, a joke which needed an illustration if it was to be understood, and now the deputy- director leant over K.’s desk, took his pencil from his hand, and drew the illustration on the writing pad that K. had intended for his ideas about his case.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Sheesh! And I thought we had it tough in Europe! As a Dutchman I bought an Audi A4 from a German dealership a few years back an imported it into Holland. After I bought it, the Dealership passed me the European Type Approval certificate plus the title. It then took me about two hours to go through customs and registration in Holland: 1. German Title, Type Approval and passport were checked 2. European stolen car database was checked 3. Technical safety inspection plus environmental check were 4. I Forked over additional taxes for importing a car A week later I had my Dutch Title and registration plus license plates in hand!
I currently live in Montana, whose MVD would issue a title and tags to a dead moose - this in spite of being a front plate state. Getting a title is a 5 minute job and no one ever checks the VIN. No state sales tax either. Titles and driver licensing were in two different buildings across town from one another (in Helena) but each was a painless task. Tag fees are high-ish but any car over 10 years old qualifies for permanent tags. Plus, you can choose from one of approximately 7000 plate designs. You will see a lot of sketchily imported gray market cars running around with Montana plates.