For Once, Not About Mice: Lotus Adventures in Registry Hell

After I gushed two weeks ago about the gorgeous, running 1969 Lotus Elan +2 I was able to buy because both a serious mouse contamination issue, and the fact that the wife of the deceased owner wanted to sell the car before winter, allowed me to craft the right offer, some of you are probably wondering why I didn’t immediately write an article with the obligatory photos of the Lotus heater box equivalent of Mouse King Tut’s tomb, and instead threw together a lightweight piece about how a glove got stuck in my other Lotus’ cooling fan (and yes, I’m now a guy who can say “my other Lotus”).

The answer is that I thought I was going to have to return the car.

Wait, what?

Here’s what happened.

I looked at the Elan +2 in New Hampshire on the Sunday before Halloween. The next day, I made the offer, the seller accepted, I wired her the money, and insured the car with Hagerty. The broker who had possession of the car was available on Thursday. I reserved a U-Haul auto transporter, picked it up first thing Thursday morning, hitched it to the Nissan Armada—my first tow with the full Moog-Bilstein replacement for the defunct self-leveling rear suspension—and drove up to Sandown, New Hampshire to pass papers and grab the car. As I’ve written about elsewhere, even when a U-Haul dealer is nearby, the totality of hitching, loading, unloading, unhitching, and returning makes for a long day. The car was only about an hour north of me, but end-to-end, the whole thing still took six hours.

But I didn’t care. I was over the moon. The video of me driving the +2 off the trailer can be seen here. I immediately took a victory lap around the neighborhood, which ended in the car’s right front wheel grinding badly. Hey, whatever. Literal noise in the big picture of things. Probably just a worn pad or a stuck caliper. Add it to the punch list. I drove the car into the garage, parked it in the spot of honor over the mid-rise lift, and immediately began investigating the mouse issue by pulling off the corrugated hoses connecting the heater box to the vents.

The following morning, I went to the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (motto: “Where dreams go to die”) with the car’s New Hampshire title, the packet of estate sale documents that the broker prepared, and the Massachusetts Registration and Title Application (RTA) form that Hagerty sent me. The registry agent pored over the documents, found them in order, and began to register the car.

And then it all hit the fan. I heard the agent utter the word “stolen,” and got a sick feeling in my gut. She called over another agent. They conferred, then phoned a third agent. I heard one of them say “no, it hasn’t been purged.” I was told that, according to some database that sounded like “enema vee teets” (I’m sorry, but that’s what I heard), the car was “marked as stolen” and therefore couldn’t be registered. The agent printed a document for me—the registry version of walking papers—summarizing the failed application. It listed the car’s make and model, the short 6-digit VIN (502164), the “marked as stolen” status, and that the theft date was 03-June-1987 and the law agency associated with the theft report was the Yarmouth, Massachusetts police department.

I was dumbfounded. This wasn’t some sketchy barn-find car. It was legally titled in New Hampshire by the owner in 2013 and sold by his estate with all manner of documentation including his death certificate.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked the agent. She was not terribly helpful, saying only that it’s the seller’s responsibility to clear the “marked as stolen” status.

I walked out of the registry in a daze. This passion purchase, the car I looked forward to spending happy wrenching and driving hours with during these stressful times, was suddenly a massive source of the very stress it was supposed to alleviate.

I immediately texted and emailed the broker and the seller (the owner’s wife), thereby creating a paper trail telling them what happened and stating that if there was no path to registering the car in my home state, I’d need to return it. To their enormous credit, they both responded quickly, stating unequivocally that they’d take the car back if this couldn’t be worked out.

The broker then called me. This is a fellow with a lot of experience handling automotive estate sales. He talked me down off the ledge, explaining that just because a car is “marked as stolen” doesn’t mean it has a rightful owner who can take it back and deprive you of your car and your money. A car can be stolen and then recovered, or declared totaled by the insurance company and then sold as a salvage vehicle, or taken by a spouse during a bitter divorce, reported stolen, and then apportioned along with other joint property.

All these things can happen without the record being cleared. Or, since the Lotus is a pre-1981 car that doesn’t have a standard 17-digit VIN and has non-unique 6-digit one instead, it’s possible that the stolen vehicle report wasn’t even for this car. He said that his experience was that there’s probably some old information in the database, that the Massachusetts RMV is persnickety about stuff like this, and that he’d call the New Hampshire RMV and look into it.

Let’s get back to that database. The acronym I misheard is NMVTIS, which stands for the National Motor Vehicle Title Information Service. It’s run by the Department of Justice and acts as a central clearinghouse for stolen vehicle information. If you go to the NMVTIS website, you’ll learn that you as an average schmo don’t have access to it—it’s for law enforcement, insurance agencies, state registries, and the like. I felt like I was being put in a position where I didn’t have the right to face my accuser.

However, the NMVTIS website lists the partnerships they have with a variety of for-fee VIN-searching agencies. Surprisingly, Carfax is not one of them, at least not at the consumer level. And, like Carfax, most of the agencies listed only process modern 17-digit VINs. But by stepping through all the listed partners, I found that Bumper.com accepted the Lotus’ 6-digit VIN. I spent the $5 to sign up for a trial membership, and learned that Bumper reported a 98 percent probability that the VIN belonged to a 1965 Ford Falcon station wagon, but had no theft information for it.

As a test of how it handled other short VINs, I entered the seven-digit VINs for three of my 1970s-era BMWs. It reported that all three of them were Volkswagen Beetles, and they’re not, thus showing that the potential non-uniqueness of short VINs is not an academic issue. This was all interesting, but it didn’t strike me as something I could take to the RMV as proof of anything. As my mind raced, I began to worry that this might be a case where they would overrule a valid New Hampshire title and the absence of anything definitive in NMVTIS because the reported theft occurred here in Massachusetts and the case was never closed.

I set several things in motion. The idea that I was going to be Paul Drake, Jim Rockford, and Magnum P.I. and gumshoe my way to the 37-year-old truth was ludicrous, but I found the name and contact info for the records officer at the Yarmouth police department, and sent him an email asking for any records pertaining to the theft of VIN 502164 on the date listed. I never heard back, so I went to my local police station. The officer there said that he couldn’t access old theft records from another town, but was happy to search for the VIN (which I assume accessed NMVTIS) to see if came up stolen. He wasn’t a car guy and was confused by the short VIN, but he ran it, and found nothing. I asked him if he could print that result, but he said “I can’t print nothing.” I wasn’t sure if he didn’t understand that I was asking for a screen shot, or if the program didn’t allow that and only allowed a printed report if it found something, but the upshot was that I left without anything I could take to the registry.

Next, although the Elan +2 was insured through Hagerty, I thought that my local agent who insures our daily drivers and our house might have more Massachusetts-specific boots-on-the-ground knowledge. I literally sent her an email titled “I’m using my ‘I’ve been a loyal customer for decades’ free-spin card,” and told her I’d buy her flowers and chocolate if she could help. She said she’d make contact with the compliance officer at the registry, which I appreciated but it didn’t sound like a magic bullet.

After the weekend, the broker called me saying that he spoke with two of the car’s previous owners, neither of whom knew anything about a reported theft. Coincidentally, one of them actually lived on Cape Cod not far from Yarmouth, but the car never ran during his ownership (which was decades after 1987), and he’d never registered it in Massachusetts. He also spoke with the title desk at the New Hampshire DMV, who reported that they could see that the car had been “marked as stolen” in NMVTIS, but that the status had been changed to “purged.” He said that they said that if the Massachusetts RMV rechecked the information in NMVTIS, they should see the “purged” status. I thanked him, but I thought that me returning to the Massachusetts registry and telling them how the New Hampshire registry thinks they should do their job was unlikely to be a path to success.

While all this was going on, I wasn’t sure whether or not I should be working on the car. I certainly wasn’t about to go all-in on tearing out the mouse-infested heater box if I might have to return it, but the grinding front wheel was a potentially awkward issue. It didn’t do that when I bought it, and the idea of returning it in a broken condition where someone else couldn’t test-drive it felt wrong. I jacked up the car and found that one of the bolts securing the front right caliper had snapped off, likely long ago, allowing the caliper to rotate and hit the rotor. Should I go to the effort of drilling out the bolt on a car I might have to return?

I wasn’t sure what to do next, so I contacted a guy I know through local car circles who is both a lawyer and a much more serious collector than I am. He asked me if I wanted to keep the car and if I had a paper trail for the seller and broker agreeing to take it back if things went south. I said yes to both. He said, “So we’re not talking about suing the seller.” I explained that I was primarily interested in the intersection of the 37-year-old stolen vehicle report and NMVITIS, and told him what the broker said about the New Hampshire DMV saying that the car’s status was “purged.” He recommended that I try to get a printed report attesting to that. I thanked him profusely for his advice, then contacted the broker and asked him to go into the registry in person and get evidence of the “purged” status. Unfortunately, he was not successful—at the in-person visit to the New Hampshire DMV, the representative said that reports from NMVTIS were for their eyes only.

I felt like I’d struck out. I had nothing except a printout from Bumper.com saying they had no records for the car but the VIN was likely from a Falcon. I was beginning to think that I was going to have to reverse the sale and tow the car back to New Hampshire.

They joke that Lotus stands for “Lots of Trouble, Usually Serious.” Maybe this was what they were talking about.

Then, thankfully, there were positive developments on two fronts. First, my insurance agent rode in with a white hat and forwarded me an email from the Massachusetts RMV’s own compliance officer stating that, “It appears that the service center rejected the transaction before receiving a response back from the NMVTIS Helpdesk. I would recommend we advise the customer to return to the service center. The CSR will need to request NMVTIS approval. The helpdesk will research the status and advise the CSR on next steps. Having already reviewed this one, I will let the NMVTIS helpdesk staff know to be on the lookout for it.” In other words, the registry had a procedure they didn’t follow. Whoever this compliance officer was, I wanted to hug them.

Next, the broker phoned with unexpected good news. He called the New Hampshire title desk again, and this time got an agent who discovered that the vehicle’s New Hampshire title had never been entered into NMVTIS. Further, this fellow was essentially the NH-MA registry liaison, so he sent an email summarizing the situation to his counterpart in Massachusetts, asked them to review the info in NMVTIS, and said that they should see both the “purged” status as well as the valid New Hampshire title. I was ecstatic. I almost ran right down to the registry, but decided to give it an extra day for the information to percolate through.

So, eight days after the crushing denial, I returned to the registry, arriving at 7:30 for an 8 a.m. opening. Even being first in line, you still have to stop at the triage desk where they check everything before handing you a number. I explained the situation and respectfully asked to be assigned whatever agent has the most experience with NMVTIS, and that I’d gladly wait for that person to be available. The triage agent made no eye contact and just handed me the automatically-generated Q100 number, like Bill Murray in Stripes ordering a fancy meal in boot camp before receiving a ladle full of slop. Well, I thought, this isn’t starting off well.

When my number was called, I was alarmed that I drew the same registry agent who the week before had consulted with two others and then denied me registration. Could my luck get any worse?

I gathered my wits, pulled out the printed email from the registry compliance officer as well as my printed explanation of what the fellow from the New Hampshire RMV title desk said, presented my case, and asked as respectfully as possible if she could check the NMVTIS database for the most current information.

“I can,” she said, “But NMVTIS doesn’t open ‘til 9 a.m.”

“I’ll wait,” I said.

“You don’t have to wait here,” she said. “Target is open at the other end of the mall. You can get a cup of coffee there. Then come back and sit where I can see you. You don’t need to wait in line again. I’ll call your name when I know something.” I was taken aback by her flash of kindness.

I went for a short walk, got my cup of coffee, sat, and waited for the jury to come in.

At 9:03, she called my name. When I reached her booth, I saw that she had a set of license plates ready. I waited while she entered the data into her terminal and printed out a registration and a bill, but I knew I was home free. All the stress fell away. With the precious goods in hand, I drove directly to Trader Joe’s for flowers and chocolate, and from there to my insurance agent. (I said “Rob Siegel for Kathy. I have no appointment, but I have flowers and chocolate.” They pulled her out of a Zoom meeting. It was awesome.)

But wait. There was one more registry-related surprise in store. Three days later, when I tried to get the car inspected, I was denied because when the registry agent entered the license plate number into her terminal, she vertically transposed the “W” on the plate to an “M,” and the computer at the inspection station couldn’t process it with the discrepancy. D’oh!

Back to the registry I went for the third time. Again I arrived early, and again I got the same agent. I showed her what happened. She was very apologetic. I left with a matching registration. The car is now inspected.

Whew!

So, what did happen in Yarmouth in 1987? Was it even the same car? On the one hand, don’t know, don’t care. On the other hand, I wonder, had the Yarmouth PD rifled through boxes of police records and handed me a copy of a theft report that listed the stolen vehicle with VIN 502164 as not a Lotus but a 1965 Ford Falcon, whether there was even a quick path for me to get that information into NMVTIS, or whether those gears of justice would’ve taken months to turn.

What’s the big take-away message here? I’ve owned over a hundred cars in my life, and I’d never had this happen before. I’d always thought that running a Carfax (which I do for any 17-digit VIN car I’m interested in so I can get a bead on its history and whether or not it has a salvage title) also checks if it’s stolen. I now know that it doesn’t check NMVTIS. And entering the Lotus’ 6-digit VIN into supposedly NMVTIS-accessing Bumper.com showed that it and my state weren’t seeing the same thing, and thus there was no way to know in advance that I would receive a capricious “marked as stolen” denial at the registry. Imagine how badly this could’ve gone wrong if I couldn’t get it registered and the sellers wouldn’t take the car back. We’re talking lawyers and billable hours. This is why the more valuable a car is, the more important provenance becomes.

Most of us are just people operating at varying degrees of muddling through. Some are on automatic pilot or are handcuffed by process and procedure, some try to be helpful, and some go above and beyond. So huge thanks to the Massachusetts registry compliance officer, the fellow at the New Hampshire RMV who updated the NMVTIS data, my insurance agent, and the broker from whom I purchased the car for his professionalism and follow-through. And my lawyer/collector friend.

1969 Lotus Elan +2. Winter project. Dead mice. Bring it on.