Vaibhav Chopda knows he has no hope of ever finding his silver Honda Civic, which was towed from his apartment complex nine months ago. He has given up hope that the DMV or the district attorney will help him. But he still hopes to teach a lesson to the guys who took his car and sold it.
"What they did was wrong; it was wrong," he says.
He's right, but he is having a hard time proving it.
You may recall Chopda's story. Last April the engineer and his wife went on a six-week trip to India and left his 2004 Civic DX sedan parked at his Mountain View apartment complex. He didn't know the complex manager had hired Auto Ambulance, a Santa Clara towing company, to do a sweep of the parking lot and remove abandoned cars.
A forgotten sticker
Because Chopda had forgotten to put his current registration sticker on his car, the towing company considered it abandoned, slapped a warning notice on it and then towed it on May 1, even though a quick check with the Department of Motor Vehicles would have shown that his registration was current.
When Chopda returned in June, he found his car gone and a letter from the towing company saying it would be sold at a lien sale.
But by the time he got the letter, the car already had been sold for $2,280. And the new owner immediately turned around and listed it on Craigslist for $8,500.
Chopda and his wife, as you can imagine, were beside themselves. So was I.
And so were readers when they heard his story. If your car isn't safe at your own apartment complex, where is it safe? While the company had the right to tow the car, it didn't have the right to sell it. State law says if a car is worth $4,000 or more, the towing company has to jump through a bunch of hoops, which takes more than a couple of months, and then hold onto the car for 10 days after the sale so the original owner can claim it.
Auto Ambulance didn't do that. The company proceeded as if the car were valued at $4,000 or less, which only requires 31 days' notice. If the company had followed the law, Chopda would have gotten his car back.
No case, says DA.
Chopda figured he had a case against Auto Ambulance and went to the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office. But after going over the company's records, the DA told Chopda it wasn't going to prosecute.
"They'll be only making a criminal case if they manage to find a few more victims like me," Chopda told me. "They wouldn't be able to do much if I am the lone victim."
The lien sale regulations are in the civil code, so his only option is to sue the towing company. But he hasn't found a lawyer willing to take the case.
Matt Harris from the DA's consumer protection unit confirmed that the investigation is closed.
"We spent lots and lots of time trying to get to the bottom of it," he said.
Harris said he couldn't find evidence that Auto Ambulance had a pattern of underestimating car values. "If there had been a pattern, we would have been all over it," he said.
I talked to Anthony Boskovich, the attorney for Auto Ambulance, who said the company turned over hundreds of pages of documents to the DA about this and past lien sales.
"Everything was in order," he said.
Boskovich insists the company acted in good faith and had no way of knowing the car's value.
"Because it was towed, they don't have the keys," he said. "You're looking at a car that you can't start; you don't know the mileage. You don't even know if it runs."
But even if it had 100,000 miles on it and was only in "fair" condition, the Kelley Blue Book value on a 2004 Civic DX is $4,905. If the guy who tried to sell it on Craigslist thought it was worth $8,500, how could the towing company figure it was worth less than half that?
At this point, the couple's only resort is to go to small claims court. They're hoping to find other victims and ask anyone who might be able to help with the case to contact Chopda at
VaibhavChopda@yahoo.com.
"I believe that testimony by an expert witness is crucial for me to convince the judge," he said. "But people in the towing company business aren't willing to speak against other towing companies."
If they win, the most they can get in small claims court is $7,500 - and the satisfaction of seeing justice done.
Meanwhile, they are trying to put this awful experience behind them. They had to borrow $8,000 from friends to buy another car ? and have paid off that loan. And they have moved to another apartment complex, one with assigned parking slots.
"Whenever I take a trip in the future, I will definitely park my car at somebody's place that I know, somebody who can check it every day.''
