Used-car peace of mind -- cheap

By Marilyn Lewis

It took 16 years and a lawsuit, but the federal government has finally launched its long-awaited national wreck registry. It's meant to help state motor vehicle departments check a used vehicle's history for any record of theft or damage before issuing a new title.

But consumers can use the registry, too, making it a second cheap way -- along with the insurance industry's own database -- to check out a used car.

The new National Motor Vehicle Title Information System is far from perfect. But its major contribution will be to require insurance companies, starting March 1, to share the vehicle identification numbers, or VINs, of cars they've declared a total loss.

That, consumer advocates say, should effectively end title washing, in which auto resellers purchase cars with titles branded "salvage," "flood" or "junk," fix them up them and outfit them with new, clean titles obtained from states with lax title requirements.

"This makes it very hard for people committing fraud to just move a car across state lines," says Deepak Gupta, an attorney for the consumer group Public Citizen.

Cheaper than a lemon

For $2.50 a pop, consumers can access the database now. You pick a participating vendor and plug in a vehicle identification number to purchase a report drawing from state motor vehicle department records to see a vehicle's title history, the odometer reading when the title was issued and whether a state DMV has branded the vehicle a wreck. (View a sample report from Auto Data Direct.)

The Department of Justice says the registry covers 73% of all vehicles on the road. But users may find the service spotty.

"There are widely varying degrees of qualities in these reports, just like with the driver's license reports," says consumer advocate Jeff Ostroff, who runs CarBuyingTips.com. His associate tested the system using the VIN of a car he'd previously owned. One vendor proclaimed the VIN invalid, and the other vendor's site was down for maintenance.

Gupta cautions that the registry is meant to enhance -- not replace -- the existing commercial VIN check services by plugging holes in the vast, complicated patchwork of data sources used by those companies.

The wreck registry also complements VINCheck, the National Insurance Crime Bureau's online database. The free information source is updated instantly and covers about three-quarters of wrecked vehicles, alerting potential buyers of theft and flood claims. But it, too, is incomplete: It doesn't have DMV records or data from insurers who aren't bureau members; vehicles that were self-insured by fleets or simply uninsured are missing as well.

But the two services, flaws and all, make an ideal and cheap first stop to screen a used car.

Some vehicles impossible to salvage

It's "exciting" progress, says Rosemary Shahan, the president of the nonprofit Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, based in Sacramento, Calif. Hers was one of three consumer groups -- the others were Public Citizen and Consumer Action -- that sued the federal government to make it enforce a 1992 law creating the registry.

These vehicle histories can literally mean life or death, Shahan says. Millions of vehicles are offered for sale once they've been cleaned up and repaired after having been declared a total loss from a crash, fire or natural disaster. A half-million cars wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, for instance, were salvaged and resold after they'd marinated in a stew of petrochemicals and bacteria, Shahan says. The new national registry is supposed to stop that practice.

"There is no way they could be made safe," she says. That's because crucial electronic circuits were likely damaged. A previously flooded engine could die in traffic; brakes could give out under stress; air bags could fail to deploy in a crash.

A tortured history

The transition from a state-to-state patchwork to a comprehensive national registry will take time, says Gupta, who is the lead consumers' attorney in the lawsuit. "DMVs get this from a variety of sources, and it differs from state to state. It's whatever the state agencies have in their records."

The law requires state motor vehicle departments to check a vehicle's VIN against the registry before issuing a title. Some are doing it; others are not.

Continued: What to do before you buy

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