Toyota Stalking, er...um, SPOTTING with Charlie™ (Cars, vans, SUVs, Lexus, Scion, and brochures)!

My theory is that something broke that was very expensive to fix, and the car was sold to a mechanic or wholesaler; 160K miles, in my opinion, is very barely broken in for a late 1990s Camry, so why it wasn't fixed and put back on the road is beyond me...

 

Ummmmm... just a thought, but maybe you should have made this a pm instead of a thread.

 

The VIN is visible in your screenshot.

 

This is actually an ongoing thing with Carfax...

My dad saves windows stickers; I have run the VINs of three vehicles purchased new by my parents and subsequently traded in...

• A 1993 Chevy S-10 Blazer traded for a new Nissan Pathfinder in 1996; Trail goes cold here in PA in 2005...
• A 2000 GMC Safari conversion van, traded for a new Honda Odyssey; Trail goes cold in Ohio in 2010ish...?
• The aforementioned 1996 Pathfinder, which was traded for the Tacoma I currently have back in September 2009; The Carfax shows it as being repossessed from the second owner in June 2010, and then the trail goes cold...

None of these vehicles show any accidents, and all still have clear titles; I made a thread on here about dead end Carfax reports years ago, but aside from someone telling me the Pathfinder likely ended up getting scrapped after nobody bought it, I ended up with more questions than answers...

 

Not anymore it isn't...

 

Missed one =)

 

No, I didn't; The VIN was only in the first screenshot, and I blacked that out...

 

For Pete's sake; I just want people's opinions on why a car that's shown as having a clear title and only one minor accident would seemingly vanish!

A guy I know had a 2007 Suburban that he traded in for a new Dodge Ram 1500 maybe 8 years ago; I had pictures of this Suburban, which I had gotten his permission to take, that I intended to use for a YouTube video project. I ran the license the plate through Carfax a couple years after he got rid of it, and the report showed that the Suburban had been sold at wholesale and ended up in the Middle East (I believed it was the United Arab Emirates, but it might have been Saudi Arabia; I forget); Obviously, once it's no longer registered in the USA, it can be run through Carfax anymore. Based on the fact that the Suburban had obscenely high miles for its age, was already on its second engine, and lacked working air-conditioning, I would venture to guess that it was shipped out to the Middle East as a parts vehicle for some rich guy's Suburban (The Suburban is sold new in the Middle East) that needed bodywork or something. The Camry's trail, along with the trails of my parents' three cars, just goes cold...

 

@ABA180
@shakerhood
@Squatting Pigeon
@Taco critter

Anybody have any ideas why a car's Carfax report would go suddenly cold for nearly 16 years?

 

I googled the VIN & got no results. I suspect the car is no longer in service as further details would be on the Carfax.

I've been guilty of this pining for the past, woulda, coulda, shoulda shit myself Charlie. It's neither positive nor productive.

 

This has nothing to do with the girl whose mom owned the car; As stated above, my dad saves window stickers, and I have reached similar dead ends when running Carfax reports on VINs from those vehicles...

By contrast, my dad had a 1992 Dodge Dakota that he bought new and owned for a year (he decided he wanted a 4x4); Carfax shows that my dad's Dodge stayed in possession of the second owner and ended up a couple hours away from me in York, Pennsylvania. Carfax shows it as being traded in at a Mazda dealer in Carlisle in the summer of 2019, and then sold for scrap by the at dealer with just shy of 150K on the clock.

My parents' other three vehicles do not show a "scrap" title like the 1992 Dodge, and it's as if they were just parked somewhere and left to rot; Ditto the 1997 Camry...

 

Maybe someone parked it and its just sitting

 

That's exactly what I was thinking; It makes absolutely no sense to me that somebody would just park a Camry though...

 

Several years ago my neighbor bought a Buick from a Widow, he put less than 1000 miles on it before he parked it in his garage.

 

Then... why tag one person in the OP... let alone a moderator??

 

If it was badly damaged in an accident and written off by an insurance company, the car would have gotten a salvage title. With the miles it had despite being less than 10 years old at the time it disappeared from public record, it's much more plausible that someone would salvage what parts they could and then recycle what was left. However, the car is shown as having a clear title, which would indicate that it was just parked after an expensive-to-fix mechanical failure of some sort and possibly used for parts; It's also possible that the car was involved in a single-vehicle accident or was the victim of a hit-and-run, and only had liability coverage...

If either of those scenarios was the case, the car would still have a clear title regardless of the damage severity, and it's possible that it was sold to a mechanic or body shop for parts; It is entirely possible that there is a gutted, and possibly badly damaged, shell of a Camry sitting behind a body shop or garage in Northern Virginia almost 16 years after it was taken off the road...

I don't even want to think about what that poor car looks like now! Probably a biohazard that looks worse than the totaled 2010 Taco I found in a junkyard after it had been sitting for 4 years!



That said, even a vehicle that was rear-ended by a semi and burst into flames as a result would have a clear title if the accident wasn't reported to insurance. After thinking about this, I'm thinking that this Camry is still rotting behind a garage in Fairfax County nearly 20 years after it was taken off the road, but I'd still like to hear the opinions of others!

 

I like to run old VIN#s too, pretty cool to try to figure out where or what happened to old vehicles.

 

It's no secret that I like to run VINs through Carfax, and Chris happens to be a moderator but he is also one of my staunchest allies here on TW and had a lot of very good info about automotive stuff; That's the reason I tagged him...

And also, I was an admin on Facebook group for maybe six months; I ended up leaving as an admin (I'm still a member and post regularly) because among other things the group founder and another admin had found out that I ran license plates through Carfax and didn't take too kindly to it. They saw it as creepy and an invasion of privacy...

I felt as though I was being bullied, and I left as admin...