Hit the buffers

Sadly, it is now more or less certain that I’ll be unable to register my new bike, meaning that it’ll be illegal for me to use it on French roads. I received a message from the registration authority yesterday after my third attempt to do so, when I had been confident that I’d submitted all the documents that were needed. But I was wrong.

The message said that I’d only submitted a declaration from the manufacturer that it conformed to regulatory requirements whereas what was needed was a copy of the official Certificate of Conformity issued to the manufacturer for the machine by an agency of an EU member state’s government confirming that it did so.

So, as I suspected might be the case, Dakeya, my bike’s manufacturer, needed to have applied to the appropriate French agency, for example, to sell the bike in France and for the agency to have checked that it conformed, possibly tested it and issued the relevant certificate. My guess is that a hefty fee would have been involved somewhere along the line which is possibly why the manufacturer hadn’t done so.

It may be that the process is more straightforward than I think it might be – after all, it can’t be as stringent as obtaining type-approval for a new motor vehicle – but I don’t have the time or motivation to take the matter any further as I now have other priorities to attend to. Like servicing my aircraft and getting them back into the air and getting the interior of my house ship-shape.

I’m disappointed that it’s come to this but French bureaucracy is so intractable and it’s not worth spending any more time and effort. I’ve now requested CDiscount, the web site through which I bought the bike, to arrange for its return for a full refund and I hope that they’ll cooperate without making a fuss as I’ve been a pretty valuable customer of theirs over many years. But we’ll just have to wait and see what transpires from here 🙁