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Show DIFFICULT MATTER TO IDENTIFY AUTO Stolen Car Usually Taken to the Factory and Different Parts Scattered About. (By ERWIM GREER, President Greer College Col-lege o Automotive Engineering. Chicago.) If you were asked whether you could identify your own car under any set of circumstances your impulse would be to return an unqualified and indignant indig-nant affirmative. The police- of our city would disagree with you Just as unqualifiedly. As a matter of fact, most car owners own-ers depends upon identification on some scratch on the body, some broken bro-ken screw in the chassis, or some other oth-er equally uncertain factor. They do not stop to consider that the big manufacturers are turning out models In 10,000 lots that differ from each other in not the slightest discernible degree. By the time a successful thief has run a stolen car through his "service "serv-ice station" It would puzzle the most careful owner on earth to Identify his vehicle. Identification Not Convincing. An instance in point is illustrated. Arriving at the police station a car owner found a small group of other owners who had assembled to try and Identify the same car. The hopeful owner had a number of marks by which he felt confident he could prove his ownership. There was a bent screw, a dent in one fender, a scratch of peculiar shape on the dash. The car with which he was confronted was undoubtedly of the same vintage as his stolen one, but unhappily it was painted a rich ultramarine blue, instead in-stead of the dark green that had graced his vehicle. The most earnest scrutiny failed to disclose any of the aisringuisnea marks on which he had relied. A slight chipping of the new coat of enamel revealed the fact that it had been put on over a previous coat of dark green that our friend had described, but two of the other assembled assem-bled owners had put in bids for dnrk green cars and eventually one of them managed to Identify the car by a chip in the gearset housing. The Identification Identifi-cation was not particularly convincing, but in the absence of anything better it served to give the car to the owner who had been able to describe the imperfection. im-perfection. Different Parts Scattered. No car owner ought to depend upon such casual means of identification as slight imperfections that may have been accrued during the operation of the vehicle. When the professional motorcar thief steals a car he takes It to what amounts practically to a rebuilding re-building factory. In many cases the entire mechanism is taken down and the different parts redistributed with those from other cars of the same makes and models to turn out to what amounts to new vehicles. . |