When we first started planning our move to Europe, we had a simple vision: we wouldn’t need a car.
European cities are designed differently than American ones. Shops are nearby. Public transit works. Walking is normal. The idea of driving everywhere just … fades away.
At least, that was the plan.
Reality had other ideas.
Because of COVID restrictions, we never got to make the final exploratory trip that would have helped us choose between Lisbon and Porto. Instead, we made what was essentially an educated guess.
Porto is a wonderful city, but during the pandemic years it turned out to be a place where having a car was sometimes very useful. So, we bought one.
But at long last, we are about to become car-free. It took us five years, three cities, two countries, several government agencies, an automotive engineer, and one extremely patient bureaucratic specialist named Estelle to finally make it happen.
The numbers tell part of the story. In the four years after we moved from Porto to Lisbon, we only put 14,000 kilometers on the car. Way less than most Americans drive in a single year. The car was more of an insurance policy than a daily necessity.
When we moved to Valencia last summer, the car had some important moments of usefulness. It allowed us to take an exploratory road trip before the move, and it was invaluable when we actually relocated, especially when transporting a cat and several birds across the Iberian Peninsula.
But once we settled in, something interesting happened.
The car went into the garage in July. And it didn’t come out again until mid-December.
That was the moment we realized we didn’t really own a car anymore. We owned a parking space with a car stored in it.
Valencia, as it turns out, is an incredibly easy city to live in without a car. Most of what we need is within walking distance. The metro works well. Taxis are plentiful when needed. Owning a car here isn’t freedom; it’s mostly paperwork and parking logistics.
Speaking of paperwork – part of the services we hired through the Valencia Expat team included assistance with registering our Portuguese car in Spain. What we didn’t realize at the time was that this would become the single most complicated bureaucratic task of our entire move.
Their vehicle specialist, Estelle, sent me a list of required documents. One of them was an EU Certificate of Conformity, which certifies that the vehicle meets European standards.
There was just one problem. We never received one when we bought the car in Portugal. I went through every scrap of paperwork from the purchase. Nothing. No certificate. No mention of one.
The solution was to hire an automotive engineer to create the documentation from scratch. This required sending him an impressive set of photographs: the VIN plate, door plates, tire markings, lights, and various other identifying details of the vehicle. It felt less like registering a car and more like documenting a museum artifact.
Once that was completed, another complication appeared. When I bought the car in Portugal, I had purchased it in the name of my company so that I could write it off as a business expense. When we moved to Spain, however, I closed the company because there was no longer any advantage to keeping it.
Which meant the car technically belonged to a company that no longer existed.
So, before Spain would register the car, I had to sell it … from my company … to myself. This required a purchase contract, documentation of bank transfers, and still more paperwork prepared with Estelle’s help.
Finally armed with our ever-growing stack of documents, I went to the ITV (Spanish automotive safety inspection agency) office to make an appointment for the vehicle inspection.
Oddly, you cannot make this appointment online, nor do you get an appointment date when you go in. Instead, you must go there in person to request an appointment so that they can call you later to schedule the appointment.
They estimated it would take six weeks, but to their credit, they called me to schedule in only three.
On inspection day, I brought the car in at the appointed time and waited a mere two hours before the inspection actually began. By Spanish bureaucratic standards, this is considered fairly efficient.
The car passed, and I was instructed to return ten days later to pick up the paperwork.
Once we had that, Estelle and I visited the DGT (the Spanish national motor vehicle agency) to complete the Spanish registration.
One small perk of being over 65: you can simply show up without an appointment. You don’t get priority, but you are allowed in the door. After about an hour of waiting, I paid the fee and received the official registration paperwork, including authorization to obtain Spanish license plates.
Interestingly, the government does not actually issue the plates themselves. Instead, they license private vendors to manufacture and sell them.
So, after months of engineering reports, inspections, contracts, and government offices, the final step took place at the key duplication stand inside El Corte Inglés, where they happily made my license plates.
Which brings us to the final reveal.
After all of that effort …
We’re selling the car.
It simply makes no sense to own one in Valencia. Between insurance, annual taxes, maintenance, and safety inspections every two years, the costs and hassle outweigh the benefits.
In fact, we ran the numbers and realized that we could rent a luxury car for a week every other month for road trips and still spend less than the cost of just insuring the vehicle.
Even better, our lease allows us to rent out our parking spaces. We have two of them, and parking in the city center easily goes for €150 or more per month. So instead of paying to store a car we rarely use, we may actually make money from the parking.
At this point, you might reasonably ask: why go through all this trouble if we were planning to sell the car anyway?
Because there was one more catch.
You cannot sell a car in Spain unless it is properly registered in Spain.
So, before we could get rid of the car, we first had to complete the entire registration process.
Meanwhile, most of our daily life happens on foot. About 80 percent of what we need is within walking distance. The metro handles longer trips. Taxis fill the occasional gap.
After five years, two countries, and a heroic amount of paperwork, we are finally about to become the car-free Europeans we imagined being all along.