Cars you used to own - do any survive?

BrianD3

I spent much of yesterday looking up the status of my family's old cars on the vehicle info website cartell.ie which is linked to the government vehicle database. You enter the registration in a form and get info like date of first registration, no. of owners, status, date of last sale, expiry date of NCT and tax etc.

The vehicle checks were free yesterday only (presumably to promote the site). Unfortunately the charge is 25 euros per check now though. Did anyone else look up any of their old cars while it was free. What did you find?

I was hoping that some of our cars might be still on the road but it appears that every single one of them are gone. I guess this is not at all surprising. A few have status "scrapped, destroyed" others have "current" status but haven't been taxed in years so presumably they have been informally scrapped or left in a field etc.

The ones I looked up were from the late 70s to the early 90s. I wasn't able to check a couple of the seventies ones as they weren't found in the database.

The cars I checked were nothing special just normal everyday Fords, Toyotas, Fiats, Renaults. Ironically some of the cars that we had the most trouble with survived the longest. Eg a 1984 Ford Orion that we bought new and owned for two years, in that time it had countless mechancial problems and was already rusting. Yet it seems to have survived until the year 2000 which was when it was last taxed and its current status is "scrapped destroyed". The last owner owned it for 11 years judging by the last date of sale. In contrast some of the Renaults we owned which were superior cars in every way to the 80s Fords only lasted 5-8 years. May have been crashed and informally written off as they didn't have "written off" status.

Anyone else find looking up stuff like this fascinating but also a bit saddening to know the fate of cars you used to own, cars you remember being shiny and new and/or have good memories.

dubtom

I'm surprised you remember the registrations, I can just about remember my current cars numbers.I didn't know that site existed much less being free yesterday. I would have liked to look up an Omega that I had and wrote off, well, insurance wrote off, since seen it being used as a taxi.

Traumadoc

Found my old corrado was still alive- I was the 2nd owner its now on number 8! Brings back very fond memories- (youth, single,etc)

BrianD3

dubtom wrote:

I'm surprised you remember the registrations, I can just about remember my current cars numbers.I didn't know that site existed much less being free yesterday. I would have liked to look up an Omega that I had and wrote off, well, insurance wrote off, since seen it being used as a taxi.

Yeah I remembered many of the registrations. For the ones I couldn't remember I had to dig up old photos and 8 mm films where the cars appeared