Wendi’s Wanders

. . .  open the eye of thine insight, travel in all the realms of God, see the splendour of the Kingdom and behold the effulgence of the Realm of might. Bahai writings

My old car was becoming a liability and beginning to cost a lot to repair and service, so I decided to take advantage of the UK government’s old car scrappage scheme, which gives you £2000 towards a brand new car if you scrap your old one.

There are some rules for this: your old car must be a passenger car or small van up to 3.5 tonnes in weight; it has to have been registered in the UK before 1 August 1999; it must still be registered with the DVLA; it must have an MOT certificate; and you must have owned it for more than one year. The rules are to prevent people from buying up rusty wrecks for a few hundred pounds and scrapping them for unfair profit.

The general idea is that there will be fewer high carbon emitting cars on the road. The other idea is that the ailing motor industry will get a boost. The idea for me was, for the first time since 1975, to get a new car.

As my car was well over 10 years old, I’d owned it for most of that time, it was MOTed and everything, it qualified. What I didn’t realise was that `scrapping’ means `crushing’. This is how it works. Once you have decided what new car you want, you have to ascertain that it is actually available. This is because under this scheme you have to hand over your old car to the dealer before you can get the new car. You also have to hand over your car registration document and MOT tax disc. Then the dealer contacts the crushing service, which has 48 hours to collect your old car. From the time of collection, it then has 48 hours to crush your car and issue a certificate of crushing to the dealer - in fact, though, there is a backlog, as so many people have taken up this option this may take longer. Until the dealer gets the certificate of crushing, your new car cannot be registered to you. In the meantime, you have no car . . .

You also need to arrange the insurance for the new car, as it cannot be registered until you have this. Of course, until you have the registration number of the car, you can’t get insurance. So the timing is a bit tricky. In the meantime, you have no car . . .

Once the registration number has been assigned, you can buy insurance. For me, this was the longer part of the whole thing. I compared insurance prices on line - but when I went to buy the insurance, it `only’ took four hours (most of the time was trying to get through to the chosen insurance company on the phone, as a crucial question needed to be answered by a real person). Getting the certificate to the dealer is also tricky. The dealer cannot accept anything other than the original certificate of insurance or cover note - a fax won’t do, `for security reasons’ the insurers won’t email it to you and the cover note can’t be delivered for a week, during which you have no car…

But once all these issues are sorted, you can get your new car. I bought a bright red Honda Insight, a petrol-electric hybrid. I really love it!

Technorati Tags: Bahai, Baha’i, Honda Insight, hybrids, cars, UK scrappage scheme, car insurance

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