How old is my car?

Buying a car that has sat in dealer stock for a full 12 months was once a trap for suckers.

These days, the car company and its dealer network will make no secret of selling ‘old-plated’ cars. They’ll also run expensive advertising campaigns to market ‘last year’ cars to consumers.

What was once a necessary evil – clearing stock – has become a marketing tool to get people stampeding in through the showroom doors.

But as much as plate clearances have become a big business opportunity and a boon for buyers, it begs a couple of questions.

Are you, for instance, buying an ‘old’ car rather than a new one? And how will buying an old-plated car affect its resale value when it comes time to sell or trade in?

To answer these, let’s look at how we decide a car’s age.

The build plate marks the completion of the car’s manufacture. Traditionally located somewhere in the engine bay, the build plate is rivetted to a structural member of the body. It can be the firewall, but may also be one of the strut towers, for instance, or the leading edge of the bonnet.

In recent years the build plate is more frequently a powder-coated label bonded to the car’s body. It usually conveys information that’s unique to the car – the Vehicle Identification Number, or VIN – stamped into the plate.

The VIN is a 17-character identifier that conveys all sorts of information. There may be other information on the plate that’s not unique to the car, including engine type, transmission type, trim code, option code and colour code. 

Your car’s build plate bears a date (month and year). This is the ‘year’ of the car that a valuer will use to decide market value at trade-in time. If the build date reveals the car to have been built in November 2017, it will be valued as a 2017 model – even if you purchased the car in February 2018 and it was not registered until that month.

After the car has rolled off a vessel at an Aussie port, it is placed in bond store and a compliance plate is fitted. Like the build plate, the compliance plate has been traditionally located in the engine bay, but it can also be located on a strong structural member such as a B-pillar, concealed by the driver’s door when closed.

Also in common with build plates, the compliance plate was once an aluminium plate rivetted to the car, but these days it’s just as likely to be a powder-coated label bonded to the car.

The compliance plate, as the name indicates, is proof that the car complies with Australian Design Rules (ADRs) and can be registered for use on Australian roads. By law, it must feature an approval number from the regulatory body, the federal Department of Infrastructure, which oversees transport in Australia.

The compliance plate must also feature the category (usually MA for light vehicles), the name of the manufacturer, model line and series/generation and the VIN. Other data points appearing on the compliance plate are GVM (gross vehicle mass in kilograms) and the seating capacity.

Each compliance plate is also emblazoned with the following text: “THIS VEHICLE WAS MANUFACTURED TO COMPLY WITH THE MOTOR VEHICLE STANDARDS ACT 1989”.

With effect from July 1, 2021, the Motor Vehicle Standards Act 1989 is supplanted by the Road Vehicles Standards Act 2018. The RVS is described by the Department of Infrastructure – the federal government department that oversees transport in Australia – as “the biggest legislative overhaul of road vehicle regulation in over 30 years”.

Furthermore, according to the department, the RVS framework “sets nationally consistent standards suited to the 21st century”.

One of the highlights of RVS is that it brings with it a ‘Register of Approved Vehicles’ (RAV), which is “a publicly searchable database of vehicles that have met the requirements of the RVS legislation and been approved to be provided to the Australian market”.

This change to the way cars are approved for the local market does away with the need for a physical compliance plate for cars listed on the RAV.

By the time a car rolls off the end of the production line and actually has registration plates affixed to it, a full 12 months may have passed.

Shipping a car, even from a country in close proximity to Australia (from within the Asia-Pacific region), could take a month. It may take six weeks or more if it’s coming from North America or Europe – and that could blow out further if someone parks a container ship at an angle across the Suez Canal.

It takes a while for the car to be delivered to a bond store from the docks. If it arrives near the end of the year, it will be held up over the Christmas/New Year period.

Then it has to go through the compliance process. Every step of that process can add weeks or months – as in the event of a global pandemic slowing supply – and then the vehicle has to be transported to a retailer, where the car has to be prepared for sale.

It may sit in dealer stock for months more waiting for that perfect buyer who wants that exact combination of colour, trim materials and options.

After the buyer signs the contract of sale and leaves a deposit, it may take another week for the vehicle to be registered and delivered.

If you buy up to around April or May of one year, there’s a better than even chance the car you’ve purchased will have been built during the previous year.

The milestones in the ‘life’ of your car
• Build date – the month and year the car rolled off the end of the production line
• Compliance date – the month and year the car arrived in Australia and was certified for road use
• Sale date – logged in the car’s service manual, the date you took delivery of the vehicle
• Registration date – The official date the car was registered for use, usually the same as the sale date
• Model year – An arbitrary year to mark the start of a new specification; sometimes a calendar year, but more often commencing months earlier
• Series or generation – a marketing or engineering code to distinguish model years in a lifecycle with architecture, powertrain and other engineering facets in common

In the northern hemisphere it has been common practice to introduce a new model year in the last quarter of the preceding year. So a 2020 model may be introduced in October or November of 2019.

There are plenty of reasons given for this; some of them sound like urban myths. One reason is that the introduction of new model years occurs around the end of the third quarter, coinciding with the traditional dates for major motor shows in Frankfurt and Paris.

That alone doesn’t explain it, however. In the US, it is not unknown for some new model years to be introduced as much as nine months prior to the commencement of the respective calendar year.

And some manufacturers are introducing running changes to the model line with such frequency that the model years have to be broken down into quarters.

At the time of publication, Ford is already taking orders for the 2021.75 model year of Ranger while the 2021.25 model line is still on sale and being delivered to customers.

There’s often no plate or documentation to reveal to the buyer which model year of vehicle they’re buying, but trainspotters will be able to pick them by minor styling details or trivial specification changes.

In short, how a manufacturer chooses to label its vehicle in terms of model years can be very misleading and is frequently irrelevant to whether the car is worth more for being a later model year unless the specification is markedly different – as in the case of a ‘Life Cycle Impulse’ (LCI) update from BMW.

Almost everyone who knows anything about the local automotive industry will be able to picture an FJ Holden. The year 1953 will immediately spring to mind. For Ford fans, perhaps the XD Falcon will bring back memories of 1979.

In their day, local manufacturers were very reliant on codes rather than model years to distinguish new designs or facelifts from what went on before.

But the Europeans also separate different generations of model families, with Baumeister codes for Mercedes-Benz – W126, W140, W220, etc for S-Class – and the Entwicklungsnummer (development number) for BMW – E34, E39, E60, etc for 5 Series.

And Toyota, among the Asian brands, is particularly well known for its ‘katashiki’ (model) codes – ACV30 for Camry, TA22 for Celica, UZJ200 for LandCruiser, etc.

Outside of the manufacturer’s own R&D facilities, these codes end up being little more than shorthand expressions for the benefit of enthusiasts.

A ‘VF II’ Commodore signifies a world of difference from the ‘ZB’ Commodore...

So, you’ve learned that your car is not a 2018 model after all. You bought it that year, but the compliance plate clearly indicates it was not only manufactured during the previous year but was present in this country before the end of 2017.

That will cost you when it comes time to trade the car for a new one.

Nor will private buyers care much that your car was only registered and driven on local roads for the first time in 2018. It’s plated 2017, so that will be their bargaining chip to shave another couple of hundred bucks off the price.

That, of course, is the issue to bear in mind. The price gap between a car built one year and a car first registered the following year may not have much bearing on the final transaction price you can negotiate with the dealer or a private buyer when you’re selling the car.

And anyway, if you bought the car during a ‘plated’ clearance, you probably saved more on the purchase price than you are losing on the trade-in value.

So don’t sweat it – particularly if you plan to keep the car for a long time. By the car’s 10th birthday, any difference in resale between the year of build and the first year of registration will likely be negligible.

And ultimately, resale will be informed by the car’s condition just as much as its plated year... if not more.

If your old-plated car has travelled low kilometres, has been regularly serviced and is in mint condition, its ‘birth’ year pre-dating its year of first registration will have little, if any, impact on its value to a dealer or a buyer.

In reality, an older car in great condition and very ‘authentic’ will be worth more than a younger car of the same specification if the latter has led a harder life.