Interestingly, car dealers in Germany usually require you to pay in cash.

I think this is because getting ownership of a car (the keys and papers) has legal implications and so you need an atomic transaction.

They don’t have cashier’s checks or banker’s drafts in Germany?

Germany is a very cash-oriented society. Many independent businesses don't take credit cards and most consumers prefer to pay in cash. Germans are very privacy-conscious, and there's a latent suspicion of debt and intangible money because of Weimar-era hyperinflation.

https://www.german-way.com/germanys-cash-culture-geld-stinkt...

Which is slightly odd, considering that in hyperinflation, paper cash was losing value just as fast as intangible money.

However, the privacy aspect makes cash usage understandable. But it is somewhat inconvenient sometimes - for example, you generally have to be prepared to pay taxis by cash, not bank/credit card as in Nordics.

And there is a culture of hiding assets from the state. I remember a while back the German police where regularly catching pensioners driving to Luxembourg to smuggle large amounts of euros which they did not want to pay tax on.

A cashier's check is effectively a cash equivalent - it's a check guaranteed by the bank, wherein they basically freeze the funds in your account at the time you write the check. The only real purpose of it is to save people from carrying around huge amounts of cash. So that doesn't really answer his question.

Very very very rarely. I've never seen or heard of anyone using either personally and I'm not even sure where I would get a check book or cash in a check.

Germany is very cash. You pay taxi in cash, you pay the restaurant in cash and you pay the train in cash. Credit Cards exist but largely the EC system is prefered since it's not credit based and pulls from your bank account instead. And I only really fall back to EC when I run out of cash and I know I'm going to be at a place that has a card reader.

> None of the banks I have accounts with ever gave me a chequebook.

We have to request them and pay a small fee for them. They aren’t typically issued when you open the account. You just receive a debit card.

Exceptions may exist. This is only my experience.

Oh, I'm sure you can get them somehow, I'm just saying that they're so rare that no bank gives them out by default (nor have I ever seen one or know what to do with it).

Is there still a universal system of acceptance of checks, though, like there was Eurocheques before 2001? Any bank can presumably issue checks, but if no car dealerships take them...?

Banks still take them. I remember shops in my area starting to refuse them about 2000.

You can write a cheque on anything as it's just a written instruction. Sadly the story of the farmer who wrote one on the side of a cow turns out to be false.

Interesting. Is this a recent change? I paid £10 for transfer from Lloyds 5y ago.

I think that was because it cost money to transfer between SWIFT and SEPA. SEPA to SEPA is very cheap/free, and so is SWIFT to SWIFT, AFAIK. I haven't tried to send money between the two systems for a long time.