Dolly with photographic evidence that her beloved 1963 Porsche 356B actually exists How a collector’s pride and joy wound up being reported “junked” by a salvage company Dolly is a longtime Porsche fanatic, and quite the car woman. Her current pride and joy is a 1963 Porsche 356B coupe she named “Louise.” (If you know your Porsche history, Louise was Ferdinand Porsche’s daughter, sister of Ferry, who ran the company while Ferdinand and Ferry were incarcerated after World War II.) She and husband, Gordy, a longtime Alfa fanatic and former President of the Palm Springs area Desert ALFAs chapter of the […]
Dolly with photographic evidence that her beloved 1963 Porsche 356B actually exists
How a collector’s pride and joy wound up being reported “junked” by a salvage company
Dolly is a longtime Porsche fanatic, and quite the car woman. Her current pride and joy is a 1963 Porsche 356B coupe she named “Louise.” (If you know your Porsche history, Louise was Ferdinand Porsche’s daughter, sister of Ferry, who ran the company while Ferdinand and Ferry were incarcerated after World War II.) She and husband, Gordy, a longtime Alfa fanatic and former President of the Palm Springs area Desert ALFAs chapter of the Alfa Romeo Owners Club, were in their garage one day when they noticed that the tags had expired on the 356. They didn’t recall getting a renewal notice, so assumed it was a mix-up due to having recently moved.
The next day, Gordy went to the Palm Springs AAA office to renew Louise’s tags. The AAA clerk stared into the computer for a bit and told Gordy she couldn’t help him and they needed to go to DMV immediately. Of course, that wasn’t good news. They went to AAA to avoid the notorious hassles of the California DMV, but they had no choice now.
What car?
Dolly went to DMV early the next day. The clerk looked up the record in the computer and then apologized that the tags could not be renewed. “We can’t renew your registration because the car has been crushed.”
“Really,” Dolly responded. “I drove it here and it’s in your parking lot. Want to come take a look?”
The clerk kicked the situation up to a trained vehicle inspector who carefully inspected Louise. He checked the chassis plate, the engine number, and looked for a couple of the hidden chassis numbers. All verified that Dolly’s car was in fact the one that had been reported as crushed.
Records over reality
In any logical world, that would have been the end of the story — car confirmed to exist, records wrong, renew the tags and fix the records. But we are not in a logical world — we are in a bureaucratic world where official records are considered accurate until you prove them to be wrong.
Further digging determined that the Porsche had been reported as “junked,” a DMV euphemism for crushed, by SA Recycling in Orange, CA. That had been reported to the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System (NMVTIS), and its records showed the car as having a salvage title. Louise officially no longer existed.
Despite the junked Porsche having been confirmed to be there in the flesh, there was nothing DMV could do. Dolly would have to contact SA Recycling to sort out what the error might be and get everyone’s records corrected.
There was absolutely nothing fair about that, but Dolly decided the easiest thing would be to go ahead and just do it. Still, Dolly needed to get back home with Louise. The DMV agent cheerfully accepted Dolly’s $775 payment and issued her a 90-day temporary driving permit.
It’s a trailer
SA Recycling was initially noncommittal but ultimately somewhat helpful. It checked its records and determined that it had crushed a trailer that carried the exact same six-digit chassis number as the Porsche. It said it had no idea how that resulted in the Porsche being reported as junked.
Dolly suspects that someone from SA Recycling probably went into the DMV records to report the junked trailer, entered the chassis number, and the computer auto-filled the information about the Porsche.
SA Recycling copied Dolly on an email to DMV that acknowledged that it was a trailer with the same chassis number that had been junked. Dolly went back to DMV confident that this would fix everything, but it didn’t. The email was not “official” enough.
DMV was willing, however, to give Dolly a renewed title and registration. The catch is that it would be a salvage title. Obviously, that was not acceptable to her.
A remedy
Dolly made numerous calls to DMV, both her local Palm Springs office and the Sacramento headquarters, and submitted several statements of fact and affidavits at their request. Each time, the person helping her cheerfully said they would “look into it and get back to her,” but they never did. Eventually, Dolly started worrying that she might be running out of options. Then, out of the blue, she got a call from “Tony,” who said he had picked up her file to solve her problem.
Tony was sympathetic and conscientious. He understood the situation, sent Dolly a copy of the entire file, and expressed a willingness to solve the problem. The file showed that SA Recycling had reported that it had crushed the Porsche, and that its title had been surrendered to them and its license plates destroyed. Obviously, that was not true. It seemed clear that the company was actually referring to the trailer.
Tony told Dolly exactly what SA Recycling needed to write in an official letter to DMV to clear things up. Dolly recognized that what Tony asked for wasn’t all that different from what DMV had been provided in the earlier email, but she also realized that this was nothing more than a bureaucratic exercise. She agreed to go back to SA Recycling, and it complied with her request.
Now armed with the “proper” paperwork, Dolly went back to DMV and it reinstated the original title and registered Louise. Start to finish, this process took five months.
System failure
The “system” is challenged by old cars. Manufacturers have been assigning 17-character VINs to their vehicles since 1981, making them easier to identify and increasingly difficult for serial numbers to be duplicated or confused. That is certainly a good thing.
We also have the more recent development of the NMVTIS national database and near-universal state participation in that effort. (See “Legal Files,” July 2026.) That has been a boon to tracking and recovering stolen cars, and it helps protect people from being defrauded by the unscrupulous who resell cars totaled in floods and other disasters. Overall, it’s a very good thing.
But all of this apparent accuracy lets people focus entirely on the one meaningful alphanumeric — the car’s VIN. That works great in a 17-digit VIN world, but not so much in the 5- and 6-digit chassis number world of the past. With only five or six numbers to work with, and each manufacturer free to number their vehicles any way they wanted to, we predictably end up with numerous cars and other vehicles carrying the same chassis number.
DMVs all over the country have grown comfortable with looking up a car’s VIN and being able to instantly learn everything they need to know about its history. They aren’t prepared when they run into old cars with shorter chassis numbers used as VINs, and confusion is predictable. Throw in anything else that gets a serial number, like a trailer, and the chances of error grow.
For example, I once went to Oregon DMV to title a Ferrari Dino for a client. The clerk said she couldn’t do it because one was already titled under that VIN. I asked her to show me what she had. “Well, mine is a Ferrari,” I replied, “and yours is a John Deere farm tractor.”
She laughed, and went ahead with my title and registration. I’m not sure it’s that easy anymore.
I wish I had some pearls of wisdom about how to keep this from happening to you. But in our increasingly digitized world, there is not much we can do to prevent these problems from arising. The best we can do is to be prepared for them when they do happen, and be aware of what needs to be done to fix the situation.
Leave a Reply