Moving an unregistered car in Germany: 13.10 euros for the plate, 69.90 for the insurance

The car is sitting in the seller's driveway, deregistered, and it has to travel 300 kilometres home. Germany has three plate types for exactly this situation. They differ in price, in how long they last and, above all, in who is allowed to have one. The registration offices publish their fees to the cent. The largest item on the bill is not among them.

What is actually published

• Short-term plate (Kurzzeitkennzeichen), Munich registration office — from 13.10 euros — administrative fee, explicitly "plus the plates themselves"; valid for a maximum of six days, and an electronic insurance confirmation (eVB number) is required to apply
• Export plate (Ausfuhrkennzeichen), Munich registration office — from 31.80 euros — administrative fee; the city names a further 13.80 euros if the vehicle documents are exchanged at the same appointment; issued for a maximum of one year
• Export plate, Bremen service portal — 36.70 euros — administrative fee; it rises by 15.30 euros if the data cannot be retrieved from the Federal Motor Transport Authority and is not held in the local vehicle register; issued for the duration of the liability policy, at most one year
• Short-term third-party cover, BavariaDirekt — 69.90 euros one-off — liability cover for the short-term plate, no comprehensive cover
• Short-term third-party cover, Allianz Direct — no price of its own — the insurer states it does not currently offer this service (as at February 2023) and cites only third-party figures of roughly 30 euros minimum, rising to around 100 euros for wider cover
• Plates and embossing — no official fee — the ADAC gives "approx. 25 euros" for a short-term plate and "about 20 to 40 euros" for an export plate; the plates are embossed by a commercial service, not by the authority

What is striking is who is precise here and who is not. For the same export plate, two pages on the ADAC site give two different ranges: "approx. 25 to 50 euros" on the export page, "31 to 45 euros" on the transfer-plate page. Both brackets contain the official amounts — 31.80 euros in Munich, 36.70 in Bremen — without matching either. For a transfer plate overall the club gives "on average between 60 and 180 euros". That spread comes almost entirely from the insurance: the ADAC puts short-term liability cover at "approx. 30 to 150 euros", and the one provider that publishes a fixed price sits at 69.90 euros — in the middle of the range, and above every official fee put together.

Five days means six calendar days