Marketplace

Russ’ take on the latest classic market news.

We all know how much a classic’s history can add to its perceived value. The more the better; it breathes life into what, if we’re really honest, is just a useful object. So it was disappointing to belatedly discover that last year the DVLA made it harder to piece together those histories.

For ages you’ve been able to slip them a fiver to be sent details of a car’s previous owners and their addresses. Sending out letters to those was a good way to start your detective work. There are many tales of this eliciting the return of previously lost paperwork, spare keys, and even tearful reunions of much-loved cars with their past owners.

Even if those owners have moved or passed on, it still presents an opportunity to map a car’s journey through life. I cannot be the only one who has added to my various cars’ history files with Google Street View images of all the houses where they’ve lived.

But now the crime-preventing spectre of data protection has put an end to all of that. Nowadays the DVLA can merely tell you the number of past owners a particular car has had – hardly a service as it’s printed on the V5C anyway – unless releasing the information can be justified by some kind of court order.

What it does is add cache to those cars that already have that history on file, or at least come with enough paperwork, like bills with old owners’ addresses on, to piece together its past. Though I’ve also heard that some dealers are now stripping that kind of information out of history files to prevent them being charged at some later date of breaching data protection legislation.

That’s modern life I’m afraid: thanks to misuse, the easier it becomes to communicate, the less we seem to have to communicate about.