The Việt Nam Register has failed to deal with more than 186,800 outdated cars and more than 205,000 vehicles with expired registrations nationwide.— Photo atgt.vn

HÀ NỘI — The Việt Nam Register has failed to deal with more than 186,800 outdated cars and more than 205,000 vehicles with expired registrations nationwide.

All outdated cars are banned from use and owners of outdated cars have to send vehicle registration certificates back to the agency and owners of the vehicles have to take their vehicles to the agency to extend their certificates.

However, the agency received far fewer certificates of outdated cars than expected, the agency said.

In 2017, there were 3,142 outdated cars in HCM City, but only 220 registration certificates were sent back to the agency, Thanh Niên (Young People) online newspaper reported.

A representative of the HCM City Police Department’s Roads and Railways Traffic Police Office said that the office often checked outdated vehicles and ordered owners of the vehicles to send their registration certificates to the police.

But it was hard to withdraw the certificates, he said.

First, the outdated vehicles were often sold many times, making it difficult to identify the last owner of the vehicle. Second, sometimes the owner of the vehicles registered their residence in one place but lived elsewhere, causing difficulties for the police to send the notification to them. Third, vehicles owners were reluctant to co-operate, he said.

Khuất Việt Hùng, Vice Chairman of the National Committee of Traffic Safety, said the outdated cars were still being used to transport farm produce or aqua products and in some provinces, the outdated cars were used to transport students.

“We have to fix the situation,” Hùng said.

He recommended raising public awareness of the issue and increasing the level of administrative fines, he added.

Currently, according to the law, a person who drives an outdated car will receive a fine of VNĐ4-6 million (US$174-261).

Nguyễn Lê Ninh, a member of the Science-Technology-Environment Advisory Council of the HCM City Committee of Việt Nam Fatherland Front , said the register agency had to notify the owner of a vehicle that is about to become outdated and remind them to extend their vehicle registration certificates.

If the owner failed to comply, the agency was told to nofity local agencies so they could deal with the violators, he said.

Following Article 5 of Government Decree 95/2009/NĐ-CP, a vehicle carrying goods’ registration expires after 25 years, no more than 20 years for vehicles carrying passengers and 17 years for cars converted from other types of vehicles into passenger cars before January 1, 2002. The expiry date of a vehicle is calculated starting from the year of manufacture.—VNS