FA 97016

Does retired mean it's scrapped or exported, or something else?

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Unfortunately the danish vehicle registry does not have an official "scrapped"-status flag, so it's always a bit of guesswork. When a vehicle is "retired", it means that the plates are (mostly) handed over, road taxes refunded and insurance canceled. For vans and private cars, there's a couple of extra status options: "skadet" (damaged) means that the vehicle is listed as damaged, to a degree where it's deemed not currently roadworthy. A repair is theoretically possible, but rarely happens unless the car is very rare. "Totalskadet" means that the car is wrecked beyond (feasible) repair. These two status flags are very rarely used for trucks and buses, for complicated reasons to do with taxation.

When a private car or van is exported, the vehicle registry has a status flag that SHOULD change from "afmeldt" (retired) to "eksporteret" (exported), but in rare cases, the techs at the vehicle registry forget to update the status, but I'd say that 99.9% of the time, the status flag is reliable. Again: this is only used for vans and private cars, not trucks and buses.

To return to your question: if a van like this is not listed as exported, it's very unlikely to have left the country, so it's either scrapped or waiting for a new owner. Some dealers are willing to keep a vehicle for 5-6 years, waiting for the right customer (often export), but of course, the longer it's been since the last registration, the more likely the car is to get scrapped.

A van like this, first registered in 2007, active until just over a year ago, not listed as damaged and being a model popular for export... I'd say it's quite likely to still be at a dealer's place somewhere.

PS: Thanks to full VINs being public in Denmark, it's very often possible to find a specific vehicle for sale by doing a Google search for the vin, since it's often included in dealership ads.

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Makes sense! Here it was recently introduced to see if it was scrapped or just taken away from traffic.
Is export of cars like that big in Denmark?

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I wish they would introduce the same thing here. I keep a huge database of trucks and vans and it would make things a lot easier to keep udated, if I could close the records for scrapped cars, instead of having to re-check for years.

Yes, there's a lot of export from Denmark. Panel vans like VW Transporter, Ford Transit, Opel Vivaro/Movano, Toyota Hiace and MB Sprinter are particularily popular, almost no matter what age they are. French and italian panel vans like Fiat Ducato, Iveco Daily, Peugeot Boxer, Citroën Jumper, Renault Master and Renault Trafic are also popular, as long as they're not too old. Other popular models for export include Toyota Hilux, VW Caddy, VW Touran, old Mercedes-Benz cars, Opel Insignia/Astra/Corsa, Toyota Corolla/Carina/Avensis, Mazda 323/626/6.

There's also quite a lot of import, mainly of slightly used (2-4 years) luxury cars like Mercedes-Benz C-class and above plus BMW.

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Here the only panel vans that are popular are Transporters and Hiaces, some Transits too, the Transporters are exported to Eastern-Europe, but the Hiaces have very long lives here, and are not exported until they are 20+ years old. Often they are not exported at all.
It looks like there aren't many HiAces in Danish gallery? Aren't they popular there.

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Oh yes, the HiAces are/were extremely popular here as well. I think the reason that there are not many of them in the danish gallery (so far) is, that the vast majority of uploads are of relatively recent plates (2010 and later) and by this time, foreign importers (vultures) had already swept the market for any HiAces for sale. Most of the ones that have survived here, have only done so because they have not been offered for sale, so they still run on older plates. If I started uploading vans with old regs, like those starting with O, P, R, S, T, U and V, you would see a ton of HiAces!

It's interesting that you say the HiAces are not exported until 20+ years old, this would indicate, that the foreign importers (vultures) are less active in your area than they are here.

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Oh makes sense.
I guess the reason is that the prices are so high here that those people will rather try to find them elsewere.
Prices are high because there is so much demand for them, as they are the first choice for anyone looking for a utilitarian van. And good those people don't come here to buy them, because HiAces are so great!

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Great expression In Hungarian, this category doesn't have an "animal" term, but those shady taxi drivers are called "hyenas"!

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The subject of export is, by the way, also the exact reason why I started applying the tag "ExportedFromDenmark" and "ImportedFromDenmark" - as more and more cars get tagged this way, it should gradually help build an image of which car models are popular for import/export. If other users do the same for their countries (provided the information is available, of course), we could - over time - get a better understanding of the flow of car models between countries.

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Intersting, I will try to. You can see if cars are exported from Norway on the vegvesen page. My parents car died in Finland, and they sold it to some local mechanic and if you search up the numberplate it shows up as exported. However that's the only time I've seen it

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I wonder if you can search with vin-number in Finland as you can in Norway, would be interesting to see if the old wreck is still alive

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I've never heard of such a service for Finland, but maybe it does exist? It would be nice to have an easy to access list of websites providing data for cars in different countries. So far, the only countries I know of, where it's possible to find any sort of data are;
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, USA, Estonia. Some of them are extremely basic, though, and others require a vin to work.

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