It’s not easy to buy a car in France as an expat. And it’s certainly not easy with the added pressure of needing a car immediately.
We had no plans of buying a car in France. We briefly entertained the idea of shipping over our Audi from the US, but quickly ditched that idea. The cost to ship, plus the changes you need to make to it to conform to French laws, plus the hassle, just wasn’t worth it. Thankfully we sold our old Audi A4 Wagon at the peak of the post-Covid supply-chain disruption. We bought the car when we returned from the UK in 2012 and it quickly became one of our favorite cars ever.
We also thought we might end up in a city with great public transport, so owning a car wasn’t at the top of our things-to-buy list. That changed when we got approved to rent the house in Vertou. And the house in Vertou, although close to a number of bus routes, really begged for a car. What else would we put in the garage?
When we’ve bought cars in the past, we did months of research (online and via Consumer Reports, Edmunds, KBB), numerous test drives, number crunching, and spreadsheet comparisons. This time, we were moving in two weeks and our car rental contract was at the same time so we had to act quickly.
Where to start?
As mentioned above, there was a supply-chain issue in France, too, and it affected inventory of both new and used cars. We were very interested in going electric or at least hybrid, timely too because the Russia/Ukraine war had just started and fuel prices were increasing. But, we weren’t the only ones looking for cars. Any car. Inventories were depleted certainly in Cholet, but in big cities as well.
We narrowed our search to a few brands including Peugeot, Toyota, and Skoda because of their hybrid offerings and ease of getting them serviced. Toyota became our target car because there was a dealer in Cholet that had a couple of hybrid RAV4s, new and used, that we could test drive.
We didn’t have the option of calling a dealer and asking about their inventory because of our lack of French. We hadn’t even been in France for a month and then we’re in car dealerships asking if anyone could speak English. Sometimes we got a salesperson who could speak some English and then sometimes we’d get someone from accounting who took English in school. It was funny and stressful at the same time.
The test drive
We found out that brand new cars on the showroom floor were not really for sale … yet. There was some sort of mandate that a car had to sit before it was sold. We test drove a used RAV4 only to be told it belonged to our salesperson. Testing driving a car with a French dashboard and French road signs in a city you don’t know with a salesperson who speaks French is not for the easily intimidated. He said we could buy that very car, but first, we had to buy another model and then trade it in 6 months later for his car. What? It was quite common, he said. No thanks.
We had emails in to multiple dealers within an hour of Cholet. Responses took forever and again, inventory was scarce. We hit all the big used car online sites and found an available car with help from our friend in France. [Note: having friends or family in a country where you can’t speak a language is absolutely priceless.]
Ultimately, Aramisauto saved the day. They had the car we wanted and they could deliver it to Nantes within a few days.
What we learned
- We couldn’t lease a car as expats, one of the reasons being that we didn’t have a French tax ID yet
- We couldn’t get a car loan for a used or new car, because loans were tight and we didn’t have a tax ID yet
- We had to have proof of car insurance. This is pretty obvious, but we had to scramble to get insurance which was a fairly large hassle.
- We were buying a car, online and as expats, so we needed all kinds of identification: passports, driving licenses, proof of insurance, birth certificate, all flying back and forth over email.
- We had to pay cash and had to work with our financial planners to quickly get a wire transfer set up.
- We had to handwrite a letter explaining why our birth names didn’t match our passports and driving licenses. I will write more about this later, but when moving to a new country, make sure all of your identification docs have the same name, whatever you use.
So, we bought our RAV4 hybrid car in just about two weeks. We picked it up (and were thankful that it was really what we had seen online) and used it the next day to move our stuff from our temporary rental to our long-term rental. We changed the dashboard into mostly English. Then, we returned our rental car and I happily drove to the recycling center on a daily basis to get rid of our 120-plus moving boxes.
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