Would you buy a car from a private party seller if the name/address on the title did not match the name/address on their driver's license?

In other words, they bought the car but never went to the DMV to get a title in their name.

Would you buy or walk?

Walk, unless the title was signed over to the seller, and notarized. If that's the case, follow the seller to the BMV and have the title switched over to the seller, then buy it from him forthright.

__________________
1987 560SL
85,000 miles

If the title is what is characterized as an "open title", the title is signed by the seller of the vehicle, but the name of the buyer is not indicated. In this situation, the buyer took possession with the full intention of selling the vehicle without getting a new title in his name.

Nothing wrong with that scenario. Just judge the vehicle with the understanding that his intention is to flip it.

Conversely, if the title shows that the buyer of the vehicle is your current seller, the title is useless to you and your current seller must tender the title and obtain a new title in his name before he can sell it to you.

Two completely different scenarios.

In fact I just DID, end of....last week.
THIS!







Found it on a used car lot and turned out it'd been consigned.

Saw it. Drove it and liked it ... but NOT the price: On which the dealer was utterly immovable.

So the actual seller, was talked into taking it off the lot, and the dealer got cut out of the deal;

The title had been signed off by an Asian owner in San Jose (SF bay area) but NEVER had a buyer's name filled in.

And the new owner was a "flipper" who'd bought the car in December just after it had been tagged last Novmber for another year.

The DEALER to whom he had consigned it, had it coaxed through the emissions test, so that expense (the sellers are supposed to do this anyway but often don't and let the car go cheaper, often a trap for the unwary and a horror for a Euro-spec gray market Mercedes) was in line, and the dealer was goaded by me to provide an Autocheck report to me, so that was $45 I did not have to spend.

It became immediately clear to me that the seller was actually Iranian ("Persians" they would rather say say) and the dealership was a new one on "discount auto row" (Buy here, pay here; Bad credit - no credit - divorce - bankruptcy - no problem etc type of lots) in Roseville - a nearby flatland town down the hill about 60 miles from up here in the Sierra foothills, where I reside. The used car lot owner's name was Persian, too, so that was evidently how the Consignment connection between the two of them probably was made . Lots of the good Iranians here in Califorrnia do like to help one another out. And I enjoyed talking to both.

Normally I'd avoid these places like the plague but the car was a sweetie!

It was a Renntech 1992 400E but with NO records.

It was in awesome condition though anyway.

So I nabbed it with a cashier's check for the discounted price after some haggling wasdone with the flipper after he removed it from the lot. There was no registration slip but that is ok in California, if everything else is there, and the tags are already paid to November, AND there was no lien holder and I liked the Autocheck and that it'd just passed emissions. The front plate (required) was gone and so was the bracket (they would look horrid on the AMG chin spoiler on thefront) and the cops in Northern California harrass you for that, quite a lot, so I decided to register it with a new set of TWO license plates - just in case.

To make it easier I went to the local AAA office's DMV section, which is more lax thn the DMV and the lines are a LOT shorter. Only one clerk was there, and one one person ahead of me.


Gave the clerk the signed off pink, added the buyers name (me and bondavi on here) as the co-new owners (thus deleting the flipper from the chain of title) filled out the pink slip on the back, and the bll of sale part, put the amount of
sale so they could figure out the tax, and put in that date, the actual San Jose seller had left the lines bank or this would not have worked, but the flipper/seller had left that part blank
(but we had gotten a bill of sale separately on a piece of paper so if there was some problem (there wasn't) we could have that to show.


Presented the calculated amount of tax in cash, with the filled out title transfer, and bill of sale,

The AAA DMV clerk pressed some buttons and a new clean title and registration car was created,

Then she hit "print" and the validated new registration came out and it bore the new license plate number, and we got two
NEW California plates, and the clerk loaned us a tool bag, they have, and so we then went outside where the car was ("honor system" is in effect here) and removed the rear plate, put the new rear brand new one on the trunk of the car, and then affixed the November 2012 sticker to the new license plate.

Went back to the AAA office again and the DMV clerk got her the AAA tool bag back with the phillips screwdriver that I borrowed. And surrendered the old licence plate we had removed, to her.

Took ten minutes max for the whole thing.



Zip Zip Zip Done.


Out the door.

As they say in the Southwest: "Slick as snake spit."



The actual new Pink slip (new title) comes to my house in about 1-2 weeks.

next up: comparing it (1992 Renntech 400E) - with the "Red Plum" 1995 E420. --- SAME but VERY different animals.

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

The one critical piece of information in that novel.

Two quite different variations of the SAME animal.



The E420 of mine is stock height, running on 17" AMG monobloclk wheels, and new Bilstein HDs and Conti Extreme Contact DWS tires, and has a Remus, everthing else is bone stock. Even the DOT mandated 2.24 that the US ones got. (Like the E 500's did. It's my daily driver but I love it and use it all the time to go everywhere, and it's more fun than my other cars, and balanced great for mountain driving with all the bad roads and potholes around here.

And earlier this week took it to San Francisco to the dentist, but it was an amazing car for me, to do quick cut-and-thrust in the San Francisco streets I know so well as a former native born and many years resident. It is VERY easy to understand why these make heavy but fast taxicab chassis in Europe a dozen years ago. And in the 3rd world, even today, with their spaciousness and large trunks, even with small 200/220 gasoline, or the diesel engines in them.

They are VERY tossable and manueverable. Almost anywhere!


~~~



But in the last day and a half I'd had the Renntech in my hands, (basically to do a further detail and clean up right here at home), and have put 150 miles on it in most traffic and road conditions. Everyone up here in town up here in the Sierra Foothills, that saw and heard it pretty much agreed that it was sensational looking and sounding but is ABSOLUTELY the wrong wrong wrong kind of car for badly maintained roads with potholes, or high curbs, or anywhere at all with parking lot concrete stops. Like..... around *here.* So I won't be keeping it...I think.

The body kit would be beat up in 2 weeks or so, I think, most especially the beautiful front chin spoiler, in this case a complex looking AMG one. And they a re horrendously difficult to fine to replace, Barry Taylor of AMG West, back in the glory market of the gray market and AMG conversions, when he was crazy busy, every day, told me he sold them - the front chin spoilers of AMG, cheerfully, to Insurance companies for $2,500 EACH, because the multimillionaire customers that wanted them INSISTED on AMG original kit pieces that ever got damaged and had to be replaced on their new AMG cars. ANd HE was the only place that had them easily available.

In conditions like this, the "fun factor" is gone in many areas and these obstacles, and also, many parking lot exits had to be approached at the oblique and very slowly ans cautiously, while entering or exiting driveways.


Once out on the highways, though, it was a blast!! This one has a 2.82 mated to the engine, and when you floor it and ask it to go, it *REALLY* GOES!!! An endless rush of torque to 100 mph - and beyond, if you dare, (with attendant risk to your driving privilege, if you dare) - in these out-of -joint times, rife with inattenative and cell-phone preoccupied drivers every on the road.

All told I have so far run it up to 150 miles, before putting it back in David's hands, (the co owner and certain buyer) and if *I* were a flatlander I would NEVER have let go.

It is seriously lowered, (how much we are not sure, but so much, the mechanic could not get it on any of his lifts so it could be properly checked underneath, in the PPI process. (for fear of damaging the body kit.) Not to mention god - knows - what flying over a 80+ or less, mph over the whoop- de do's on some less traveled roads, could do to the car's kit, or tirte scrub on the wheel wells, would have, though I was conservative and attentive and had NO problems..

That's because it's running 18" AMG wheels as you can see.


I did some VERY informal zero to sixty runs, a couple of times, at freeway on ramps -- and my rough count of them was about 6.4/6.5 (maybe a little less) seconds or so, so something was amiss in the tuning. Or something else. It only kicked down to 3 not 2, for example. (I thought).

At 105 mph the car was loafing at less than 4500 rpm.


It is a sweet highway ride but with whatever suspension setup it actually has, and nobody seems to know, just now, it handles beautifully at speeds that would have most cars cornering on their door handles.

I loved driving this raw beast.

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

THAT^^^ was no problem. Sorry to disappoint you.

The AAA clerk in that section is authorized to perform California DMV transfers, and she simply charged me a $21 late fee from December, to the end of last week and added it into the registration fees that I was told to pay.

Done.

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

You hardly disappointed me.

The OP, however, might have preferred the answer to his question and may not have preferred watching you unwrap a new vehicle for yourself............completely OT.

I would walk. If the current "owner" acquired any red light tickets, toll road violations, parking tickets, or had a warrant issued against the plate, you could end up in the situation of having to prove you did not own the car at the time those events occurred. While I'm not an attorney and don't play one on the Internet, the lack of a paper trail showing the current owner even exists would give me significant pause about acquiring a car that was never titled to the current owner.

I'll note that here in Texas, the seller can inform the state on the date they sell a car, and that information is retained in the title & registration records of the vehicle. That would put you in the situation of proving that you were not the buyer back then, and hence not responsible for all the mayhem caused by the vehicle since that date.

Guess what: you are NOT the Moderator here any more, so you can't type

INAPPROPRIATE

B.C.

on here any more, though obviously you'd love to, along with hurling out "Infractions" all over the place.

Sorry to disappoint you.

And it's NOT off-topic, it was a direct response to the OP's question. Framed by a true, recent real -life example.


Take a deep breath. Go read the OP's post again. And observe YOUR personal infraction count on here.

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

My step father use to flip cars like that and made good money doing so. I bought a car or two that way and had very good luck, but that was many years ago. I wouldn't do that now.

__________________
For the Saved, this world is the worst it will ever get.
For the unSaved, this world is the best it will ever get.

Clk's Ebay Stuff BUY SOMETHING NOW!!!

WHY wouldn't you?

Do you got beady eyes or something? <------

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

I do get beady eyed. I am so ashamed...

__________________
For the Saved, this world is the worst it will ever get.
For the unSaved, this world is the best it will ever get.

Clk's Ebay Stuff BUY SOMETHING NOW!!!

Nah, I really don't care about infractions anymore and you hardly disappoint me.

Your inability to focus on the topic, however, may disappoint others.

I already know your capabilities..............

I'd be curious as to how the "current owner" could register and drive the vehicle without a proper title. AFAIK, this is impossible and he'd have to be moving it with dealer plates or fraudulent plates.

I don't see any risk to the OP.