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VIN Stamping And Other Irregularities
I got a strange call to appraise an even stranger car - a highly modified Porsche 911. It looked nice and had a lot of money spent on it, but it had some problems. The above VIN sticker with the digits 'punched' was in the correct place on the door jam. When I looked for the stamped VIN in the front luggage compartment it wasn't there, nor was the metal VIN plate that should have been on the inside of the front fender. Further investigation revealed that the car had started life as a 911SC and not a 930 (Porsche 911 Turbo) as indicated on the VIN. The VIN sticker was a reproduction, easily purchased on-line, and the VIN was from a wrecked 930.
I appraised another car, and there was no VIN stamp, sticker, or manufacturers plate on the entire car. The VIN on the Registration was seemingly random, and not in sequence for the production run of the vehicle, or even the engine number or body number. There was nothing on the vehicle that tied it to the registration documents. Apart from possession, the owner would have a tough time proving that he owned the car.
On another classic I looked at the Manufacturers plate and it looked original with the letters and digits unevenly stamped - but it was a reproduction too. Somebody went to some considerable trouble to make the plate look original - but they got the colour wrong!
In the above cases, there was no nefarious intent, and no harm done as the cars weren't trying to pretend to be something they were not. They were just titled in a way that was expedient at the time - decades ago when Registries didn't check things very carefully. It does illustrate that you can't rely on VIN plates to authenticate a car.
While not widespread, VIN tampering, fake stamping and other misrepresentations are not uncommon either. 'Matching Numbers' can add 20% or more to the value of a car, so when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, you can bet bad actors are out there either faking the entire car, or individual components.
Most manufacturers have some sort of 'Birth Certificate' for their classic cars. Porsche has a Certificate of Authenticity, Mercedes-Benz provides Data Cards and the British cars have a BMIHT (British Motor Industry Heritage Trust) Certificate. Depending on the car, you can buy these on line or over the phone, generally without proving ownership. Manufacturer Data Plates can be ordered for even the most obscure makes.
A really nice Austin Healy 100 is worth $USD100,000. If it was built with the 'Le Mans Kit' at the factory, it was called a 100M. The changes amounted to not much more than different carburetors, a cold air box and a louvered bonnet with a leather strap. A factory built 100M is worth $200,000. The 'proof' that you have a 100M lies in the BMIHT Certificate that shows that the car was optionally equipped with the louvered bonnet. The 640 100M's were all made in a short period of time, and nearly all together. Some guys just bought a bunch of BMIHT Certificates in the expected VIN range and picked out a couple of 100M VINs and built cars around them. Nice.
Things get really interesting when trying to establish the provenance of old racing cars - some of which can be worth tens of Millions of dollars. There were racing cars that were crashed and rebuilt as road cars and sold as new. Just about all of them were re-bodied at one time or another because of damage or changes in regulations. Virtually the only racing cars from the 1950's and 1960's that have their original bodies are the ones that for whatever reason were never raced. If the chassis was a write off, the mechanical components may have had a second life in another chassis, or refurbished and put in a road car. Sometimes a car would be issued a new VIN to get through customs without paying. Certainly nobody cared about the car's provenance - they were tools to do a job and they were scrapped when they couldn't do it anymore.
When these cars became valuable, various parts were exhumed and made into cars again - even if most of the car was new. There is a joke about Jaguar C Types - the sports racing car that won Le Mans twice in the early 1950s - that 53 were made and 60 survive! What happens is that somebody will find a C Type engine and build a car around that, and somebody else will find the wrecked chassis (or part of it) and build another car around it. Now you have two C-Types claiming to be the same car and millions of dollars at stake.
It doesn't even have to be a particularly faithful replica to fool people. One year I took part in the Pebble Beach Tour d'Elegance which sees the cars from the Concours drive down to Big Sur and back on the Thursday before the Sunday judging. The cars stop in Carmel-by-the-Sea on Ocean Avenue where they are displayed during lunch. They close the road for the occasion, and the public gets to view the cars without paying and taking 2 hours to park at the Concours. A 'C' Jag with Alberta plates parked beside us. The owner lifted the bonnet which was clearly fibreglass. The car had a 17 digit VIN. I had a discussion with a guy looking at car who wouldn't believe me that the car was a replica. Cheeky move from the Edmonton owner to crash the party - I think he got a free lunch too!
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