Unfortunately, some time ago (and before the sale of the car), my particular car was stolen and recovered by the nsw police (in the process, fitted with a nsw surrogate vin number). When the vehicle was stolen they removed the build plaque, the compliance plate and cut the vin number out of the chassis, probably in an effort of rebirthing or to legitimise a clone.

Fortunately, along with my car came a pair of rather important documents (among others), these being the original purchase and deposit papers that include information about the car and its sale.

Zanardo and Rodriquez are still in business today and are part of a group which includes canterbury and sylvania bmw dealerships. I have contacted the dealership in an effort to gather some more information about my car in particular, but as they are interstate, communication is largely via telephone, with working being busy the past couple of weeks I havent had time to follow up on the calls.

Unfortunately, in talking with both the nsw police and RTA (main roads/department of transport), my quest to recover the original bmw produced vin number has not been a happy one. Neither are prepared to give out any information that might help me, neither will actually tell me if this sort of information is actually on file (simply stating they cannot giveout information about the history of a vehicle and/or info over the phone). Instead they have suggested traveling into nsw with the vehicle, visit a station and plead my case to see if I get lucky.

Needless to say, im not impressed. If this were another country the information on the vin would be available. Im not asking for personal information on previous owners or anything like that, I just want to know what the vin number was before the car was stolen.

If both of the turn out to be worthless, the one saving grace might be a hidden build plate bmw affix to their vehicles. Every early bmw I have owned has had a blank plate, containing the vin and build year, fixed to the cross bar underneath the dash. This is the sort of thing that can't be reached unless the dash is removed, and fortunately, is the sort of thing thieves probably wouldnt know about, nor have the time to remove.

The original vin number is required to search for documents about the car, bmw keep a large database of information about pretty much all the vehicles they produce, this includes special editions (such as this) and performance vehicles (such as the ///M range). You can contact the head office for information which they will supply upon request with a valid vin number.

Stay tuned for any developments that occur.