Turning in your car tags

On Oct 21, 8:02 am, mm <NOPSAMmm2...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Oct 2007 07:31:03 -0400, Mike Jacobs <mjacobs...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> This won't help the OP at all, and is pretty much irrelevant to his
> post, but....

So, we'll start a new thread.

> >I don't know about MN, but here in MD you can't cancel your mandatory
> >insurance on a car you own until you physically TURN IN the old tags
> >to the MVA. 
>
> It may be that you can, if you transfer the insurance to another car.

Sure, you can keep the same policy, but you can't take that car off the policy until you turn in the tags.  The insurer will notify MVA right away that "car X" no longer is insured by them, and if "car X" still has tags on it, the feces hit the rotational ventilator.   Fines start right away and are compounded daily.

> At least, someone I know said he did that, when he was depressed and
> not thinking well.

Yes, he was not thinking well, or you misunderstood what he said.

> After he realized he was supposed to have turned in the tags, he
> realized he was so late that the fine for not doing so promptly would
> be large.  So he did nothing.

Not a bright idea in any case, and especially where the fines are increasing daily.   The sooner you cut it off, the easier it will be to get out of the mess.

> Now he's waiting for the other shoe to fall, a big fine in the mail,
> although I think it has been five years, during which time he's heard
> nothing from the DMV even though during that time he got new plates
> for his new used car, and then renewed those plates.

Something else must be going on here, as you tangentially infer below:

> Does it matter that he scrapped his old car?

Heck yes, it matters.   Why didn't you say so in the first place?   What MVA cares about is not letting the car get on the road, with or without tags, if it is without insurance.   A car that it turned into a ball of scrap is not going to wind up on the road and, potentially, injure others without means of being financially responsible; therefore, no problemo, if he (or someone else, such as the tow truck operator who carts his beater to the junkyard) just files a simple form attesting to that fact.

Obviously, I oversimplified by saying you HAVE TO turn in your tags to get off the hook and be allowed to cancel mandatory insurance in MD without being in violation of the law and paying a large and compounding fine for doing so.   That was AFAIK a correct statement of MD law as applied to OP's situation, where his tags were still on the car he sold to his buyer.  But that doesn't cover all possible situations, nor did I intend to exhaustively discuss the issue in replying to OP's concerns.  In the law, application of general principles to particular situations is almost always very fact-specific and one size rarely fits all, which is why the answer you see most often in MLM, regardless of the nature of the original query, is, "It depends."

In MD, if the tags are destroyed, or lost, or if the owner (truthfully) certifies that the car has been junked, he can keep the tags (assuming he is able to extract them from the ball of sheet metal his car turned into when it was wrecked) and still be legally allowed to cancel his insurance, if he files the required certification form with MVA.   I had to file such a form once when my daughter totalled her grandmother's old car and the tags became embedded in what was left of the bumpers so we couldn't easily get them out to turn them in. 

> I think it is the third
> car he has scrapped in Md. and he always wonders if the company that
> tows it away actually notifies the state that it is destroyed.

I'm guessing they almost certainly did, or else your friend would have heard from MVA within a very short time.

>  Once
> or twice of the three cars he scrapped he got nothing in writing from
> towtruck guy.

Your friend, to be safe, should still have filed the required form himself with MVA, since he was the car's owner, to certify that the car was permanently off the road, before cancelling his insurance coverage for that car.

<snip>

> >even though some VERY TRUSTING souls
> >allow a local purchaser to drive away in the car with their tags still
> >on it, that is on the explicit understanding that the old tags will be
> >mailed back to the seller ASAP so the seller can turn them in to MVA
>
> Does Maryland give one enough time for that to work?  I thought one
> had only a week or two (or a month??) before the fines started.

No grace period: the fines start immediately if the car is still tagged (which means it is legally allowed to be on the road, even if it is temporarily not running) and has become uninsured.

But you misunderstand me.  In the quoted example of a trusting seller, the seller still can't cancel his insurance until he gets his old tags back from the buyer, in the mail or whatever, and takes them back to the MVA to turn them in.  If that takes a week or more, seller has to keep insurance in force on that car he no longer owns, until he can turn in the tags (OR file the required certification that the car is permanently off the road with one of the boxes checked showing an acceptable excuse for why he can't turn in the tags).

THAT'S why I was so flabbergasted that OP allowed his purcaser to drive away with seller's tags still on the car, and never questioned the situation for over a year.   MN law must be different, or else OP didn't mind continuing to pay insurance on a car he no longer owned for that long.

--
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Mike Jacobs
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