Driving thru London with a historic car – update

Back in September I tried to prepare for my trip with the MGB through London city. This is an update and correction for the registration at the Transport for London website. I want to emphasis again, that I recommend to AVOID travelling by car through the ULEZ and CC zones in London if you can. Most of the time it will be not the most enjoyable trip in a historic car. Traffic is usually bad and even on a good day there will be a lot of stopping on traffic lights, intersections and pedestrian crossings – you car’s cooling system and your nerves will be challenged for sure.

Let use start with the zones first. Check out the map on the TFL website. Type in the address you want to go to and check which zone is applicable. As my son moved to a new apartment in the ULEZ zone and I could not avoid driving through it. But in order to avoid a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) that I later need to challenge – I wanted to register in advance.

The problem I faced in September was that I could not create an account with my address in Germany. As work around I used by son’s address in the UK. This week I was finally able to change it on the TFL site without error message.

Next step is to register a car. The mistake I made here was to select “My vehicle is a showman’s vehicle”. Cars that are registered outside the UK do not have a V5c document. During the validate process I went through – they just tell you that your car is not exempt because the V5c is missing. Instead select the last option on this list. On the next page a click on the “register vehicle” button will take you to another external website from a company called epcplc.com

You need to create an account there (if you haven’t done this already for other reasons). Add you license plate, make of car and the start date is a when you registered your car. Click the red button to add the car – only after this step you can add more information.

Select historic, year and so on and upload a copy of your vehicle registration (Fahrzeugschein in German). You need to accept the data processing – so tick the box I did not select in the screenshot below.

After this it can take a while until you get an email from Euro Parking Collection plc (that may arrive in the Junk mail folder – so make sure to check this….) with a confirmation that your car in LEZ and ULEZ exempt.

The last thing that you need to be aware of is the CC (Congestion Charges) zone. On the zone map it is the smallest – right in the city center. Check the operation times – I drove through it at 10pm – so no charges apply. But during the day even a historic car will need to pay in this zone. The time frame to pay for the CC charges is short – make sure to go to this page and pay either in advance or for up to three previois days to avoid a PCN.

Hopefully this make sense and helps other to quickly navigate through the TFL website – maybe it is just me, but I did not find the website and process really straight forward right away…