AutoLore - Vehicle History Documentation Platform

Growing up, my summers were filled with the rumble of engines and the gleam of chrome at car shows. My father and I would walk the rows of classics, each one a time capsule. But what struck me most wasn't just the beauty of these machines—it was the tragedy of their lost stories.

"Wonder who owned it first?" I'd ask myself. "What roads has it traveled? What memories were made?" These questions haunted every placard that simply read "Restored, [Make] [Model], [Year]" with no mention of the journey. Occasionally, I'd spot a sun-damaged photo album in an older gentleman's hands, and I'd peer curiously over the trunk's edge, trying to glimpse fragments of the vehicle's history while he flipped through it.

I vividly remember those early Saturday mornings, getting up to "help" my dad work on his 1935 Chevy in the garage. So many memories were forged in that space—watching him cut off the front end of the chassis to weld in a new one, building an engine from the oil pan up, rewiring the entire car and cleverly hiding the battery under the floorpan. My dad meticulously documented everything we did. I'll never forget the night he drove it home in a thunderstorm—my mom and I trailing behind in our white Oldsmobile Silhouette, desperately trying to keep that single fender taillight in view through the rain-obscured windshield. It became an unforgettable chapter in the '35's story. Years later, when my dad sold the car, its new owner sent a flatbed to collect it sight unseen—never learning about our journey with the vehicle, all that vital history and those precious anecdotes lost forever.

One day, my dad came over to help swap out the spark plugs. Afterward, he reminded me to document what we'd done. I grabbed a moleskine notebook, scrawled down our work, and tucked it away in the glovebox, determined to maintain the tradition of documenting the car's story for posterity. But a nagging thought persisted: physical records are fragile. They yellow and tear, disappear during moves, vanish in estate sales, or become nesting material for rodents.

The moment of clarity came when my father showed me his meticulous records for his 1971 Chevelle. Though he'd owned the car for only a few months, the amount of history he'd already captured was staggering. In that instant, I thought: "If only there was a way to preserve these stories permanently—not in emails that get lost, not on hard drives that fail, not in notebooks that mice destroy—but somewhere eternal, anchored to the one thing that never changes: the VIN." That's when the idea for AutoLore was born.