Hi All,
I live in Philadelphia.
Would I get a ticket if I was pulled over, simply for not having a title/owner’s card with me?
The car is owned by someone else, and the car and I are both legal.
Thanks!
Depends on you, the cop, and the circumstances of the stop.
This sort of question with a factual answer will probably get a better response in the General Questions forum where you will next find it.
Well, firstly, you shouldn’t ever need to be carrying the title around with you. That’s the document you keep in your records to show you own the car, so if it gets stolen or something it would be a bad thing if it’s actually in the car! I believe the owner’s card is a synonym for what most would call the registration, and you do indeed need to have that.
The requirement that you carry a physical copy of your registration is a little obsolete-- chances are the cop already ran your plate and has all the information on the card (and more) in front of him on his computer before he even gets out of the car. But you can still get a ticket for not carrying it, although just anecdotaly if your registration is current and you’ve just lost the paperwork, you’re probably only going to get a warning.
A friend got one last year here in Minnesota.
It was like a ‘fix-it’ ticket, where you have 10 days to get the item fixed and then bring the car to any police station and show them that it’s fixed, and the ticket is voided. Except that this one just required him to find the registration card* and show that to a police officer. The cop actually called it a “show-it” ticket.
*It was actually in the car all the time. After searching through various places in his house, he finally emptied everything out of the glove box, sorted it out (throwing lots of junk away) and found the registration card in the mix.
I’m pretty sure that the OP wasn’t referring to the actual title. I haven’t seen the title to any of my new cars since 1994, as I’ve financed every car I’ve bought since then and never kept a car until it was paid off.
In Louisiana and Mississippi (and I’d assume every other state), the lienholder keeps the title until the loan is paid off.