• Nougat
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    fedilink
    3511 months ago

    Couple of things here, and if I become snarky, it’s at the sovcits, not you.

    A vehicle title identifies the owner(s) and lienholder(s), if any. Vehicle registration is to put license plates on the car, in order to identify the vehicle and its likely owner/operator from a distance. (That information can also be gotten from the VIN, but a VIN is not at all easily readable, even up close.) Registration can also be used by the state to track and verify things like vehicle inspection and insurance compliance.

    It is perfectly legal to own an unregistered vehicle. You can even drive it if you want - on private property. Registering the vehicle, and complying with inspection, insurance, etc., allows you to legally drive the car on public roads. You know, the ones which are built, operated, secured, and maintained by the government.

    Once you’ve titled a vehicle in your name, you are responsible for it. If it’s wrecked or broken down, you pay to remove it from the roadway. If you sell it without transferring the title, and the new “owner” abandons it somewhere, you will be located and may be on the hook for the cost of removing it.

    Once you have registered a vehicle, the same thing applies. The only way to “cancel” your vehicle registration is to transfer the title to a new owner, at which time, that new owner is responsible for registering the vehicle (or not, keeping it on private property, or making some dumb ass fake “license plate” out of cardboard).

    • @mwproductions
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      911 months ago

      What happens when the vehicle reaches its end of life? Does the title get transferred to the company that disposes of it?

      • @BottleOfAlkahest
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        2011 months ago

        Yes, you transfer the title to the vehicle to the disposal company otherwise they would be destroying your property. Which would be illegal. For example when an insurance company scraps a car thats been totalled in an accident you send them the title and they destroy the car.

        So he’d still need to transfer that title on as long as the car is a car.