Boondock Puffins

*Disclaimer* – none of the photos in this article were taken while driving!

If there was one piece of advice that would have been useful to know before we moved to France, it would have been to leave our car behind to start with. Lulled into a false sense of security by other people’s stories (many of which were pre-Brexit, we’ve realised in hindsight), we happily packed up Dougal the bright yellow Fiat Panda Cross and took him across the Channel with us, all the way down through France and to the mountains.

Now, on the face of it, Dougal is the absolute dream car for the mountains, small, lightweight, 4×4, yellow (ok, this is optional but who isn’t cheered up by the sighting of this sort of brightness in their way), he was made for the Alps.

Unfortunately, while this is indeed true, Dougal was made for the UK more than he was made for the Alps, and as a result, his right-positioned steering wheel, left angled lights, right-hand side fog light, MPH display – you get the idea, the list goes on… and on – all make him entirely unsuitable for French paperwork.

It isn’t clear when you look online, but when it boils down to it, getting a UK car registered in France generally isn’t worth the faff. Replacing the headlights can be quite a cost, depending on what car you have, and that’s assuming you’ve been happy to pay the 10% import tax at the border. Once you’ve sorted all this, you then have to get it through a French version of an MOT (a Contrôle Technique) and only then can you apply for your Carte Grise.

All this to say, it is simply not worth the hassle, let alone the cost, of taking your UK car with you if you move to France.

As a caveat to this, from what we have been told, if you are over the age of 50, you can get year long insurance from Saga and that sort of gets you round the issue of needing to actually change the plates so long as you go back to the UK once every few months. The actual legalities of this are entirely uncertain though so check properly before you consider this option!

So, having decided we will have to take the car back to England, we are left with the task of trying to sort a left hand drive, French registered car that we could buy with minimal cost and faff and preferably get it delivered to the UK… sounds easy right! Stay tuned for our update on how this process goes.