Yes there is, Stella has supplied the details, I don’t belong, as I already belong to a tractor club. But there are many MX5s over here, I have three sets of friends that have one, we all just use them as a fun car. Do you know what part of France you are coming to?
Hi Mick
Yes, we’re moving to the Dordogne. Sold our house but yet to find one in France as three have been snapped up under our noses! We’re over this Friday house hunting. I see there is a rally down that way this Spring. Hope to meet you.
Regards
Graham
@Graham2france, we moved over with 5 motorcycles and a pickup. As soon as we had a proof if address we kicked off the process to get them registered here. Apart from getting a VAT release form, it is an entirely online process. You will need a French national to do that on your behalf, or someone that is on the Social Security system.
To make the application process as simple as possible, get your documents in order. To be registered in the UK, your vehicle had a Certificate of Conformity. That was most likely disposed of once the vehicle was registered and before hand over. You will need a copy of that, which Mazda UK should issue, try to get a copy in French. I had no problems getting French versions from UK, apart from a snooty response from Toyota - they thought the world should speak English.
If you bought the vehicle new you would have received an invoice, showing that VAT has been paid. If you bought it second hand, a piece of paper signed by both parties as a Bill os Sale or receipt will do.
You need to present proof of ID, proof of address, the UK V5C, the receipt/invoice, and the Certificate de Confirmite to the correct office in order to obtain a Quitus Fiscal. In Aveyron it was the VAT office for businesses. The same set of documents, plus the Quitus Fiscal and a Control Technique will need to be scanned for uploading in the application for registration here. Many will tell you that by the letter of the law a UK MOT, less than 6 months old, should be accepted. A French Controle Technique will not be rejected, whereas a foreign vehicle test may not be accepted first time around. You can argue the toss, present French government documents that state your MOT should be acceptable. Get on someone’s wrong side and they may demand it be translated. Save yourself the worry and hassle, get a CT, you will have to do that within a year anyway. No CT will also mean that you do not have the certificate displayed in your windscreen. Around here the Gendarmes have occasional roadside checks. They stop those vehicles that have no, or expired, insurance or Controle Technique certificates. Headlights are the biggy, I bought new pattern lights from a German car parts supplier. Fit them yourself or get your local garagiste to do it for you - a meet a local opportunity
Beware, the upload process rejected my files if they were over 1MB in size! Save them as PDF, but strip off any attempt to add indexing, that adds signficant size to the files.
It took several attempts and inexplicable errors before I found out that you must be registered on the national social system system in order to use the government vehicle registration system. The government system will advise you of local agencies that can perform vehicle registration for you, but visit them to make sure that they can do foreign vehicles. All of most local ones refused point blank but a motorcycle shop did the lot, including the car.
Some on here will recal happy days when they wandered into the local Mairie to sort this out, that is no longer possible. Macron’s reforms centralised the process into one computer system.
The one item that I bought from England that is indispensable here is a colour printer/scanner/photocopier, it has worked its socks off since arrival.
The key document for everything is your Justificatif Domicile - proof of address. Almost everyone will want a utility bill, including the utility companies!
I have scoured the for sale section on https://www.mx5france.com/ - wow they are so expensive, double the UK price.
(still tempted to get another one though!)
Best of luck house hunting, don’t let the estate agents rush you into a sale, there are plenty of properties coming onto the market, with many English returning to the uk. I would advise using more than one agent and be very careful of over priced properties, just because someone has spent a fortune on a run down property, in France it doesn’t mean it’s worth what has been spent on it, as it might be in the uk. We are in the Charente and its a buyers market, so make sure you haggle on the asking price. Best of luck.