Cars from Great Britain with the steering car placed on the right side will be allowed to move on Polish roads from the middle of August. Their registration in Poland will no longer require major rebuilding works and relocation of the steering system to the left side.
‘It's an incredible moment for me, because I have fought for this right with the Polish legislator since 2008. At that time, I wanted to register a car from England for the first time in Poland; I had to wait a couple of years, but I'm happy that this will eventually be possible,’ stresses Grzegorz Dorobek, one of the persons who have insisted on the change of regulations.
According to new rules, traffic departments will issue Polish vehicle registration plates after a number of small adjustments and upon receipt of a special certificate from a diagnostic station. The Traffic Department of the City Council of Wroclaw is prepared for the use of these new rules. ‘We have stamps for marking registration certificates with an appropriate annotation that the steering wheel of the vehicle is on the right,’ say employees of the Council.
Insurance will be twice as expensive?
However, before we obtain such annotation and number plates, we will have to adjust reflectors and side-view mirrors, install rear anti-fog lights and replace the speed meter with the one that shows speed in kilometres per hour instead of miles. This should not cost a fortune, but diagnostic technicians admit that they have not received detailed guidelines so far and are not certain how these changes should be introduced. ‘For the time being, we're waiting,’ admits a diagnostic technician from the Krzyki district in a phone call. The insurance of such a car is also an unclear issue. The only thing we know is that it will be certainly be more expensive than for cars with steering wheels on the left. ‘Each insurance company will apply its own policy in this respect, but we can guess that rates will be higher, because the risk of accident is higher if we drive such a car,’ says Grażyna Wójcik from a Wroclaw insurance agency. We learned unofficially from one of the companies that the insurance rate may be even twice as high as in the case of traditional cars from Poland.
How to register a car from England?
The procedure will not be much different from the registration of a car from Germany or France. We will traditionally need original vehicle documents, a translation of the agreement, a certificate of payment of excise tax, a proof of customs clearance, a receipt for payment of the recycling fee and an application for the registration of the car, which we will have to submit in the Traffic Department relevant to our place of residence. The owner of a car with a right-side steering wheel will also have to make required adjustments beforehand and then visit a diagnostic technician, who will check the car and issue a test certificate if everything is all right. Until now, 2,000 cars from Great Britain have been registered in Wroclaw (after rebuilding works).
