A lot of people contact us about their cars being impounded. There are numerous different types of vehicle impoundments in British Columbia, including excessive speeding, driving while prohibited, not having a license or roadside prohibitions. All of these different impounds have different lengths.
Impounds will cost you, typically, anywhere between $250.00 to $850.00. This is because the Motor Vehicle Act regulations set a certain daily rate that vehicle impound companies can charge for the storage of vehicles.
The additional charges and the variations of the costs is typically the cost associated with towing the vehicle from where it was stopped, to where it is going to be impounded.
If your vehicle is impounded for 7 days, you should expect to pay around $250.00, and if your vehicle is impounded for 30 days, you can expect to pay around $850.00. Most impounds are either 7 or 30 days, so you can generally guess how much an impoundment is
going to cost based on the length of the impound.
And if I cannot pay the fees?
By legislation, in British Columbia, if impound fees remain unpaid for a certain period of time, the vehicle can be claimed by the owners of the impound lot. It can then be sold to recover the cost associated with the outstanding impound bill.
Bare in mind, that while most impounds are 7 or 30 days, if you cannot pay the impound fees, your vehicle stays in the impound until you can pay the fees. This means that for each additional day beyond the 7 or 30 days that you don’t or can’t pay the impound fees, you
are just incurring greater and greater costs. The longer your vehicle stays there, the more that you owe.
In many circumstances, the cost or the value owing on the impoundment ends up exceeding the value of the vehicle and so the impound lot will seize the vehicle and sell it off to recuperate their costs. This process is lawful.
If your vehicle means a lot to you and is worth more to you than the cost of the impound, it’s not worth it to leave it in there for longer than necessary. You are better off borrowing the money from someone and getting the vehicle released, than allowing the cost to become so much, it will result in your vehicle being sold.
You can dispute a vehicle impoundment in BC, for any impoundment over 7 days, and if it is below 7 days, it cannot be disputed.
If the impoundment is 30 days, it can be disputed within 15 days of the date that you received the vehicle impoundment, which means that if your vehicle was impounded for 30 days, you have half the length of the impoundment to file an application for review with the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles to ask for early release of the vehicle.
Contact our office and one of our lawyers will be happy to explain that process to you.
Can I access my vehicle if it was impounded?
For a lot of people, accessing their vehicle while it is impounded is important to them. There may be personal belongings that you need that are contained in your vehicle, which are necessary to run your daily life. People often leave things like their cellphones, wallets or keys in the car and these items are obviously important to get back.
Sometimes, accessing the vehicle if it’s impounded is also important for the purposes of gathering the evidence necessary to defend you in your case. You may have dashcam footage, which you need to retrieve or alternatively your vehicle may have empty liquor containers, mouthwash bottles or something to prove an aspect of your defence.
So accessing your vehicle to obtain these things, could be critical.
In most circumstances, you are permitted to access your vehicle while it is impounded. Most impound lots will permit you to access the vehicle on one occasion only, for the purpose of gathering any belongings. When you do this, however, you will likely have to pay some, if not all, of the impound fees.
Impound lots are permitted to charge people impound fees in order to allow them access to the vehicle. The reason is that if people go and get everything they need out of the car, and the car is worth less than the cost of the impound, they may just abandon it there and that decreases the leverage that the lot has to get paid.
If you pay a portion of your impound fees, always save your receipt because not only will this help you prove that you’ve already paid portions of it, in case there’s a dispute, it will also be reimbursed to you if the impound is later determined to be invalid, like if you
successfully dispute your roadside prohibition. Not all impound fees can be reimbursed, but saving your receipt is always a good idea.
There are some circumstances in which you’re not permitted to access your vehicle once it’s been impounded. This will depend on what the police or ICBC are doing with respect to the vehicle. If ICBC has put a hold on the vehicle, this means that you are not permitted to
access the vehicle until an ICBC inspector has come to look at the vehicle and determine any potential mechanical issues or insurance breach issues, or investigate whether your statement about a collision or an accident is truthful.
ICBC, in those circumstances, does not want you to access the vehicle because they’re concerned relevant evidence may be destroyed or removed.
Similarly, when police put a hold on the vehicle, you cannot access it for the same reason.
Vehicles that are subject to a police hold are typically stored in a separate section of the impound in a secure lockup where it can only be accessed by certain individuals, and is monitored to make sure that there is no tampering with or damaging of evidence.
Because the evidence in the vehicle can also include things like DNA, fingerprints and hairs, it is important for police to ensure that there is almost no access to the vehicle beyond those who absolutely must access it. so even if you have important items that belong to you in the vehicle, if it is subject to a police hold, you will have to wait until the police have conducted their forensic examination of the vehicle.
If you are concerned that you have important items in the vehicle and that it is subjected to a police or ICBC hold, a lawyer may be able to assist you in getting some of those items back from the vehicle, without compromising the integrity of the police investigation.
You should not contact the police yourself to try and get items back, or contact ICBC, because the statements you make may end up incriminating you or being used against you in further proceedings. So it is always advisable to contact a lawyer if you are going to try and get items released from a vehicle subject to the policy of ICBC hold.
Can I fight an extended impound?
When police pull your vehicle over and decide to impound it, typically impounds are 7 days for excessive speeding or for prohibited driving. But what police don’t know is whether that vehicle has been subjected to an impoundment before.
ICBC, however, tracks the vehicle impoundments and makes determinations about whether or not a vehicle has been previously impounded by following the VIN number associated with that vehicle.
If a vehicle has previously been impounded for 7 days, by legislation in BC the vehicle impoundment is automatically extended to 30 days. What happens once the impoundment is extended, ICBC will automatically send a letter to the registered owner of the vehicle advising them of the extension of the impound length.
It’s at this point many people realize the 7 days they had budgeted for and the 7 days they had planned to be without a vehicle for is now going to be a month. You can dispute an extended impound. While you cannot dispute the 7-day impound, once it is upgraded to 30 days, you can dispute that impound.
But, it is very important to keep in mind that you have only 15 days from the date the vehicle was impounded, not from the date the vehicle was extended, to file that application.
Unfortunately, with delays in the postal system, and on ICBC’s end, many people don’t get notification of the fact that their impound had been extended until close to the seventh day, or even after that.
If your vehicle has been impounded, for excessive speeding or prohibited driving, do your best to remember whether or not that vehicle has previously been impounded, and ask any friends and family members who regularly drive the vehicle if they have ever had the
vehicle impounded before.
Additionally, you can always wait a few days and call ICBC to find out whether the impound is being extended to 30 days and they should know a couple of days after the vehicle impoundment has taken place.