PSA: changing your vehicle ownership with NZTA doesn't stop toll charges on that vehicle

The NZTA "Selling a vehicle" page states the following:

If you don’t let us know you’ve sold the vehicle, you could end up with the buyer’s bills or fines, like tolls or speeding tickets.

Well, it turns out even if you do tell them, you could still end up with tolls being charged to your account.

I just received notification this morning that an auto-topup failed on my account on the NZTA toll website. This was a bit strange given we hadn't travelled on any toll roads recently. I logged in to check the account and a vehicle that we sold to Turners 4 months ago was charged a toll yesterday.

My initial thought was that Turners had failed to change the ownership on the vehicle when they sold it, but checking with them they confirmed it had been changed.

I called NZTA and they confirmed that the tolling system and the registration system don't talk to each other. You need to manually remove your vehicle's registration from the toll website to avoid extra charges.

If you have an account on the tolling website, make sure you go and remove any sold vehicles from the account manually lest you be charged for someone else's trip 👍