Any help appreciated. I would soon like to buy a car. I already have a very old one. When I buy the car, which is from a friend as it is second hand, I would like to share the plates until I manage to sell my old banger.
The question I have is that the new insurer is not likely at all to be the same as the existing insurer and this (I think) is not permitted - shared plates have to have shared insurer.
Is there a simple fix to this ? I will ring the centre d'automobile eventually but I wondered if someone had run through this and there is a very easy way to get plates for a month for example so I temporarily run with two sets or whether it turned out to be a lot of faffing around.
What do you mean exactly? You want to have a new insurer for the other car? Then you have to pay for that separately. Or do you mean you want to share the plates with your friend so they can still use them as well?
If the former then your options are:
Add the new car to your existing insurance so you can share the plates.
Pay for the second insurance with a different insurance company until you sell the other car and can cancel the insurance on that one.
Hi Medea, yes this is closer to what I mean. I have my existing car insured with one provider, I want to use another provider for the car I will buy. I would have preferred not to get another set of plates but to be able to share the plates I have between the two cars. I don't want to use my existing, rather poor value, insurer for the new car so I had hoped I could have two insurance companies for the two cars but the same set of number plates. As I thought it looks like this isn't possible, so I will do as suggested and get new plates then hand in the old ones when I sell the old car.
When you put shared plates, you can move both cars to whichever insurance company you want. I was unhappy with a previous insurer and moved both cars to a new insurer under one shared plate. If you have multiple cars, it's a great way to change insurer without changing the name on the grey card (which could be a PITA with a leased vehicle).
Obviously under a shared plate, you have 1 contract for multiple cars, so since it's one contract it has to be with 1 counterparty.
How long do you expect that to take? And do you want both usable out of need or just because?
Did you arrange for parking space? I'm no expert, but I believe the plates can only be on one car at any given moment, so parking both in the blue zone is not an option.
I think it will just be a month or so, but in that time yes I might drive both so I will physically move plates between cars. The parking is not a problem - I live in a house with its own parking so I’m lucky enough not to have to be on the blue zone street parking.