The way it works around here is that every car is registered to a person in central registry to get plates. The registry is crosschecked daily with central insurance database to make sure all vehicles have insurance, which is mandatory by law. If you don't have it you get fine automatically, which might go to collections. People without insurance are unheard of.

This of course requires the government to have central database of vehicles, insurance contracts and citizens.

Yes, actually that would probably happen first here (Slovakia) as well. And then if you continue to not pay, they remove the car from the registry and take the plates back.

> Interesting, I wouldn't expect it to be reasonably possible to avoid that rule. More difficult than driving without a license anyway.

> if you drive without the plates that's an instant hefty fee from the first cop that sees you

How so? Said cop would have to stop you and check you have insurance. In almost 18 years of driving in France, some of I which I would drive twice a day, I've only been stopped for a police control a whopping 1 time.

Sure, I drive fairly conservatively, but basically I could've driven without license or insurance for all these years.

Also, I'm not sure dealerships have some obligation to check on these. When I bought my first motorcycle, the dealer only ever wanted to see the bank check.

According to [0], it would seem that driving without insurance is quite widespread. They say "over 30000 people have had a crash with an uninsured or runaway driver". Since I'd expect that not everyone without insurance crashes, the number must be higher than that.

Note that in France, the insurance is tied to the car, so if I drive your car, your insurance applies, even if I don't have any insurance of my own.

[0] https://www.senat.fr/questions/base/2019/qSEQ190309675.html

I know that french generally hate travelling to places that don't speak french, but if you ever did by car and didn't have all papers in order, you may be in for a big surprise. Ie Switzerland, they do frequent background checks especially on foreign plates, I'd say you have 20-30% chance of being checked on average as french on each crossing. With covid, practically any border crossing within Europe had 100% mandatory checks for certain parts of 2020 and 2021, and they often went deeper than just valid covid papers.

Also, France is a mess in quite a few aspects so not surprising when some bureaucracy doesn't work as intended (ie colleague who moved from Belgium ended up in dead-end process when migrating his driving license, literally the law covering his situation was so badly written it didn't make it possible at all to migrate his driving license to French one).

In Switzerland, no car dealer would give you keys to the car before having mandatory 3rd party damage insurance. Once you stop paying, all sorts of automated plate scanners would mark you and you would receive a massive fine, and probably a visit to court that would take your license for some time on top of that. I mean they take license for driving more than 20kmh over limit in certain situations.

If you don't have the plates, the cop doesn't have to check anything. It is very visible that you don't have them.

Doesn't France keep the registry of all cars and whether they have an insurance or not?

I've just realized I'm not completely safe though, because — if what you are saying is true — someone from France can drive their non-insured car to my country and crash into me :)

There is a missing section in you quoted part

> I believe over here the traffic inspectorate would want the plates back if you stop paying the insurance

I guess the insurance/traffic inspectorate can mark your plate as stolen-like if you stop paying without giving it back

So either the first cop that sees you without a place or the first time your plate is checked by any automated system.

We have a weird hybrid model in the US (texas, at least) where some aspects of insurance are tied to the driver and some to the car. So I personally have liability insurance that pays out to other people (the legally required part) but also have insurance that covers my car in the event of a wreck.