Good new bike news

By way of summary, in order to use my new bike on public roads here in France it has to be registered and conform to various other legal requirements. For it to be registered it has to have a Certificate of Conformity signed by the manufacturer to confirm that it meets the necessary standards of roadworthiness and safety and it didn’t have one. So I set about researching what the regulations and standards are, produced a Certificate that I believe met them and sent a copy off to the manufacturer, Dakeya, in China for them to add their official stamp and return it to me in order to try to get the registration through.

Then it all went deadly quiet and despite further messages from me it seemed to be impossible to get a response from Dakeya. This seemed weird because what I’d done was to help them out and would, if successful, also be of value to them by making all of their bikes of the same model legal for use in France. In the end it got to the point when on Tuesday I sent a registered letter off to CDiscount, from whose web site I’d purchased my bike, saying that if I couldn’t register it I’d be looking to return it and would seek a full refund from them.

So, of course, what happened was the vey next day I eventually received a very nice reply from China saying that they were very grateful for the information and suggestions that I’d provided and that they had carefully read through all of the paperwork I’d sent. And attached to the email was the Declaration of Conformity that I’d submitted to them, officially stamped and dated.

I immediately uploaded a copy to the French registration web site and now await a response. It’s been a few days and at least my application hasn’t been thrown out again, so with a bit of luck it’s now going through. I guess I’ll have to wait a little while longer to know for sure.