When buying an old car to restore, a lot of the time it is usually unregistered & has not seen the road for a period of time. If none of the vehicle's identity details have changed since it was last registered, you can perform a REVS (or whatever it is called these days) check to establish if it is encumbered etc.
But what if it has had an engine change, or has no engine at all? The old REVS system needs both a VIN & engine number to perform the check & from my understanding, doesn't inform you if the vehicle is stolen or not.
Lets say you buy a Torana that has no registration or evidence of last registration, how can you check to see it hasn't been recorded as being stolen? From my understanding, unless you have a copper for a mate, you can't.
Lets say you buy a LH Torana registered & running with a 202 6cyl & you decide to fit a 308 & make it into an SL/R replica. As is common these days, you trawl ebay & Gumtree & find a suitable 308 to buy. How can you check before parting with your hard earned & then spending more on a rebuild & fitting it to your car, that it didn't come out of a stolen vehicle?
As much as we like to assume the vendor is legitimate, unfortunately this isn't always the case & I've heard of occasions where someone has pumped years of work & plenty of cash into restoring their dream car, only to find out come time to register the car that the engine or car itself has a dubious history.
There is a thread here about a early Monaro that had a ground up restoration & the owner is having to fight tooth & nail to keep the car because it was stolen twenty years or so ago, stripped, then sold as a bare shell with a dodgy number.
But if the VIN doesn't show evidence of being tampered with, or the engine number is original as stamped by the factory, the average person has no way of checking the history either way. You have to take the chance it all works out come time to register the car. Forget the RTA or whatever they call themselves, they won't inform you if there is a discrepancy until you go to register the car.
From my experience they can make the procedure for registering a car a very frustrating experience & they couldn't care less if you've spent tens of thousands trying to put your car back on the road. They only see things in black or white & generally have no real interest in customer service.
So to get to my point, do others feel as I do that we need some sort of system to be able to check an unregistered vehicle with no proof of previous registration or second hand engine's identity status relating to being recorded as stolen etc? I would be very interested to hear other's opinions.
