Backyard genius: Don't buy a car until you've had a VIR

Pat Costigan, a Canadian immigrant, says the key to inventing is not putting your energy into lots of projects. Picture / Amos Chapple

Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not an invention.

Pat Costigan understands that.

"An invention is anything that's patentable," he says. "It doesn't have to be a widget. It may be a service or a system.

"You can patent business processes now - and we have."

Pat's invention - the Vehicle Information Report, and the software to drive it, helps car buyers by running history checks over the internet.

Pat calls it "a LIM for cars." That may sound nerdy but Pat says he's "not a super-techy".

"I like to think I'm an inventor first and a nerd second. I've got my inventor's book of ideas - as most inventors do - that I started when I was 9 years old."

That little book came with him when he headed here from Canada to help launch Clear Communications.

"I was the techy on the team. When the contract ended I could have gone back to the frozen north, but no. This is a brilliant place."

He came up with the VIR in 1992, although "it took a long, long time, as most inventions do, to get it from concept to commercial reality".

Initially, officialdom was reluctant "to allow us to have direct access to their private registries".

"No one else had done that. 'You want to look at our data?' they said. 'Oh dear, this is new and new equals bad'."

Not for too long, fortunately, or the system wouldn't exist. Here's how it works.

There are two websites: Motorweb for dealers and vir.co.nz for us. The dealers need a site because they must now display detailed official information on their window stickers. Motorweb provides that info and prints it out in sticker form.

As for ordinary buyers, you key in a plate number, push a button and Pat's team check "previous owners, money owing, whether it's flood-damaged, dodgy odometer".

The price? $25. The benefits? Well, Pat believes "we've saved so many headaches. There are so many unscrupulous sellers out there. And they're not dealers, they're private people."

In this murky market, any information is welcome.

"We get people who are happy when their report comes back clean. And we get people who are happy when it doesn't."

Despite word of mouth (and a link with trademe.co.nz), the site is still not high-profile.

"We're just starting to dip our toes in the expensive public advertising area," Pat says. "Our slogan, 'Never buy a car without a VIR', is good for jingles. I sometimes wake up at night reciting that."

Then again, in the early days, Pat was taking calls at midnight.

"I used to sleep in the office so I could answer the phones early morning and late at night. Hey, you do what you have to do."

That includes putting other inventions on hold.

But Pat's vibrating sensor/pager, Page Pal, may one day alert deaf people to phone-calls, door-knocks, alarms, crying babies or even work instructions.

"The bane of invention is having too many inventions. An inventor can have five or six brilliant ideas but unless he discards all but one, he will fail."

For Pat, that has meant sidelining the pager.

"It's got potential and, hopefully, I'll move back to it. But not yet. Something else has needed 200 per cent of my attention."