Sharing a public service announcement that might help others:
Several months ago we made a change to the title on a vehicle we’ve had for years. That must have triggered the DMV to check our auto insurance, because we subsequently received a notice in the mail stating that their records showed we had no insurance on that vehicle, and that we needed to provide proof of insurance or risk losing both the registration and our drivers licenses. I assumed this was just an error - we changed our insurance carrier nearly a year ago, but I knew we were covered. To my surprise - when I double checked our documents I realized there was a typo in the VIN shown on our auto insurance card.
In looking through our paperwork, it looks like I initially submitted the correct VIN, but it was then fat-fingered at some point during creation of the insurance policy. I was a bit surprised the insurance company doesn’t do an automatic check of the VIN to verify the vehicle and its specs, since many repair shops and auto supply shops have that ability. I absolutely know that it was still 100% MY responsibility to double-check, but I found multiple online articles noting that this is actually a common problem.
The good news is that our insurance agent very quickly resolved the issue and also backdated the change to ensure that we were properly covered during the entire period of time (almost a year). But it was disconcerting (especially since I’m very detail-oriented but yet I totally missed the error) to think that if we hadn’t decided to make that change to our title, we might never have discovered the error unless we’d been in an accident - and then we might not have been covered. Since this seems to be a fairly common issue that could have serious ramifications, I thought I would share with the forum.
Several months ago we made a change to the title on a vehicle we’ve had for years. That must have triggered the DMV to check our auto insurance, because we subsequently received a notice in the mail stating that their records showed we had no insurance on that vehicle, and that we needed to provide proof of insurance or risk losing both the registration and our drivers licenses. I assumed this was just an error - we changed our insurance carrier nearly a year ago, but I knew we were covered. To my surprise - when I double checked our documents I realized there was a typo in the VIN shown on our auto insurance card.
In looking through our paperwork, it looks like I initially submitted the correct VIN, but it was then fat-fingered at some point during creation of the insurance policy. I was a bit surprised the insurance company doesn’t do an automatic check of the VIN to verify the vehicle and its specs, since many repair shops and auto supply shops have that ability. I absolutely know that it was still 100% MY responsibility to double-check, but I found multiple online articles noting that this is actually a common problem.
The good news is that our insurance agent very quickly resolved the issue and also backdated the change to ensure that we were properly covered during the entire period of time (almost a year). But it was disconcerting (especially since I’m very detail-oriented but yet I totally missed the error) to think that if we hadn’t decided to make that change to our title, we might never have discovered the error unless we’d been in an accident - and then we might not have been covered. Since this seems to be a fairly common issue that could have serious ramifications, I thought I would share with the forum.
Statistics: Posted by Hedgehog51 — Thu Aug 22, 2024 4:51 pm