Everything You Should Know About RC Transfers (But Nobody Tells You)

In India, owning a car is a symbol of progress. But transferring its ownership? That’s where progress hits a wall.

The irony? You can buy a car in 10 minutes. But transferring it legally can take months, sometimes years. Why? Because the system wasn’t designed for speed. Or scale. Or sanity. It was designed for an era that does not exist anymore.

At CARS24, we’ve helped over 13 lakh people buy and sell cars. And we’ve seen the same story play out over and over again, delays, confusion, lost paperwork, and even legal troubles. Not because people are careless. But because the system is.

This is not just a tech problem. It’s a trust problem. And fixing it needs more than better apps, it needs better processes, better policies, and a collective push from everyone in the ecosystem.

Here is a list of what you should know, but probably don’t.

1. You can sell your car, but still legally own it.

Yes, even after full payment and handing over the keys, if the RC (Registration Certificate) isn’t transferred, you’re still the official owner. That means the fines, the accidents, even criminal cases? All traced back to you.

We think this is a widespread blind spot.

2. The RC transfer process is still stuck in the past.

In a world of instant everything, RC transfer still demands:

• Ink signatures
• Physical documents
• RTO visits
• And patience levels from another dimension

Sometimes the transfer fails because a signature was in blue ink, not black. Or because one form was photocopied instead of printed.

Digital India skipped this page.

3. The reasons for failure are borderline absurd.

Sharing some examples of what we have seen:

• Owner’s name misspelled
• Torn insurance photocopy
• Missing RTO staff for weeks
• Wrong district jurisdiction
• Address mismatch on Aadhaar

We’ve even seen transfers rejected because someone wrote ‘Gurgaon’ instead of ‘Gurugram.’

The process fails not because people don’t try, but because the margin of error is too high.

4. Different states, different rules, zero tracking.

RC transfer rules change from Delhi to Noida.

Every state has:

• Its own forms
• Its own formats
• Its own timelines
• And zero standardisation

If your buyer is from another state, good luck. There's no way to track status across borders. You’ll have better luck tracking a courier package.

5. 1% RC failures may sound small. But they’re not.

Less than 1% of RCs never get transferred. But that’s still thousands of people left exposed:

• A woman in Bengaluru was summoned for a hit-and-run she had nothing to do with because her RC was never updated.
• A cab driver in Mumbai had his car seized after buying it 8 months earlier, without knowing the seller's loan hadn’t closed.

When it fails, it fails hard.

6. There is zero transparency.

There’s no live dashboard. No digital acknowledgement. You can track your Swiggy order down to the last second but not your RC status. That’s not just ironic, it’s dangerous.

7. There is no single source of truth.

Ownership in India is fuzzy. A car might be financed by one person, driven by another and owned (on paper) by a third. There is no clean, verifiable, public database.

This creates friction, fraud and fear. Especially for buyers.

8. People don’t know what to do when it fails.

When the process gets stuck, people are left confused.

Who do you call? Who’s responsible? What’s the next step? 

Most people assume: “I’ve sold the car, my job is done.” But when things go wrong, there's no recovery loop. No system to step in and fix what failed.

9. And it’s not just our customers, it is anyone who’s ever bought or sold a car.

We’ve heard the same pain from dealers, aggregators, cab drivers, even startup founders. Everyone has a version of: “Yeh kaam kyun nahi hota?”

It’s the kind of problem everyone accepts, but no one owns.

Until now.

What is CARS24 doing?

Good question. Over the years, we have built:

• Multiple documentation checks
• A legal hotline for customers in distress
• A system that nudges everyone in the chain to act on time

But patching isn’t fixing. So we’re going one level deeper.

We are now actively working with MoRTH and state governments to:

• Identify policy-level friction points
• Suggest reforms that reflect today’s India
• Help build a process that is fast, transparent, and trustworthy

What can you do?

If you’ve faced delays, rejections, confusion or just plain absurdity while transferring your RC, we want to hear from you. Whether you used CARS24 or not, it doesn’t matter.

Your voice helps us build a case that’s hard to ignore.

[Fill out this quick survey]

Let’s co-create a system that’s built for people.

Because Better Drives, Better Lives can’t exist without better processes.