Getting rid of a car with wrong name on title

Post date: 2018-05-16 16:41:27

Our car is undrivable and we need to get rid of it. The title is in my partner's mother's name and she is across the country. How do we navigate this?

My partner's mother's gifted us the car but the title was never transferred to my partner's name. We have the physical title but it's still in their mother's name. She has moved to Texas and did not sign the title before leaving.

It's my understanding that to scrap a car you need to have the title and it needs to be in your name. The only way we can think of to make this work is to overnight her the title and she can sign it and overnight it back. But this would be $50 total for there and back, plus $70 to transfer the title, on top of whatever it's going to take to tow it, and it's not going to get much in scrap. I also don't know how long it takes for the DMV to process.

The problem we have is that the car is currently sitting in a mechanic's lot. Even if we wanted to pay to tow it somewhere else to leave it while we get it sorted out, there's nowhere to put it--it would be impossible to tow into our underground parking garage, my partner's dad only has street parking (where you have to switch sides every night), and my family is half an hour away so the cost to tow would be even more. Is there a less expensive way to do this that takes that reality into account? We're in Wisconsin if that makes a difference.

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