All is not lost (probably)…

Just to keep those who are following this saga in the picture, today was another interesting day. Getting helpful information out of French bureaucrats is like getting blood out of a stone and if you let that be the deciding factor, you’d never achieve anything.

It appears that the man from DREAL was not giving me all the information I’d asked for after all. He said that it isn’t the role of DREAL to do what manufacturers ought to do when it comes to obtaining a Certificate of Conformity ie homologation, for vehicles like my bike. I’ve delved deeper into things today and it appears that that isn’t the whole story – DREAL do have a role to play.

A vehicle for which approval is being sought has to be inspected and if necessary, subjected to tests at an approved testing centre (as you might expect) but no-one in an official capacity has told me who or where they are. But I found them myself today. I’ll not say any more about that for now but it appears that procedures have been laid down and when they have been followed and the results determined, these are then forwarded to the DREAL for the issue of a Certificate of Conformity.

Usually it’s manufacturers who do this for a proposed series of vehicles that they intend to market but it can also be done for one-offs that meet the relevant regulatory requirements both by manufacturers and individuals who have either built a one-off or imported a machine from another country as I have. So it appears that all is definitely not lost after all as far as my bike is concerned, which I think falls into this latter category ie meets the regulatory requirements for a vehicle of its class.

For the most part, the class of two and three-wheeled motorised vehicles is dominated by motor cycles (Category L3) and search as I might, I couldn’t locate the relevant paperwork to initiate a request to start a Certificate of Conformity project for a bike like mine. So I have sent a message to the testing body that seemed to me to be the most relevant and now await their reply.

If I’ve read the relevant material correctly, ‘creating a new dossier’ costs 85€ and for a motorcycle the total testing and approval programme comes out to around 2000€. This is more than I’d like to pay but I think it would be a small sum for Dakeya to pay if it opened up the whole EU market for their bikes. I also think that as electric bikes like mine are not subject to tests for eg emissions and noise, the cost might be quite a bit less, but I’ll have to wait and see.