Dubai: Effective January 1, the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) will start writing off the vehicles if their registration has not been renewed for two years, said a senior official.
"We advise motorists to renew registration of their cars at the earliest because the deadline for the three month grace period given by the RTA in October this year expires on December 31," Ahmad Hashim Behroozian, CEO of the RTA's Licensing Agency, said.
"Failure to renew the registration of the vehicles for two years will lead to writing off vehicles," he said.
"Writing off" vehicles means the records of these vehicles will be deleted from the RTA traffic files.
Once the record of a vehicle is deleted from the system, the owner will have to re-register it as a new vehicle with higher fees and fines.
Motorists will also have their vehicles confiscated by the police with heavy fines if they are found driving their cars with registration that has been expired for more than two years.
Grace period
Behroozian told Gulf News that some people did renew their car registrations during the three-month grace period, but there are still more than 50,000 vehicles which have registrations that have been expired for two years.
"These may include vehicles which are dumped by the motorists, but they should also cancel their registration with the RTA to update their files," he said.
Behroozian said drivers currently faced fines and temporary confiscation of their vehicles if they drove a car with an expired registration. But now the punishment will be higher if a car's records are wiped out by the RTA. He said by taking this action, the RTA was targeting a large proportion of motorists who did not renew their vehicle registrations, even if they had expired long ago.
Annual test
"Since such vehicles are also not taken for annual technical tests, they are unfit and can be a danger to other road users," he said.
"The law allows us to write off a vehicle's records after one year if the registration is not renewed, but we are being lenient and asking drivers whose registrations expired two or more years ago to renew them before we start writing them off," he said.
162,000 registered in 2010
The Licensing Agency of the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority registered 162,000 new vehicles from January to December 15 this year.
But it does not make a big difference in the total number of vehicles in Dubai as registrations of around 150,000 vehicles were also cancelled by their owners for various reasons, Ahmad Hashim Behroozian, CEO of the RTA's Licensing Agency, told Gulf News yesterday.
He said that it was good to note that such high numbers of new vehicles were registered, but the actual increase in the total number of vehicles as of December 15 is 12,000 which brought the total number of registered vehicles in Dubai to 1,033,880 this year compared to 1,021,880 in 2009. The number of registered vehicles in Dubai in 2006 was 740,187. Though the ratio of increase was around 17 per cent from 2006 to 2008, it fell to some three per cent in 2009, as only around 27,000 new vehicles were registered last year.
