Kraftfahrzeugbrief - The Vehicle Registration Document

"We Germans sure are a bit uptight" I thought to myself with a smile when I read this post about the in the PBC newsgroup:

Kraftfahrzeugbrief: vehicle registration document (do not store in the car, its a certificate of title. [...] Very important. Replacement very difficult! No registration in Germany possible without that! Nearly more important than the cat itself. If you don´t have that paper you are not the legal owner! No matter if you have the car or the keys of what ever.... Without "Kraftfahrzeugbrief" you have nothing!)

I smiled until I looked for the Kraftfahrzeugbrief of the blazing veedub myself. To my amazement it was gone, nowhere to be found in my tidy German filing cabinet. No Kraftfahrzeugbrief, no rallye. How can this be? I am German, I am well organized. Shit!!!

A profound sense of panic struck me. What now? Via the internet I found out that this was not the end of the world after all. The vehicle registration office issues replacement registration documents if you sign an affidavit and pay €80.

At the registration office I explained the mishap the lady in charge and signed the affidavit. "Now you just have to pay €80, and in six weeks you will get a new registration. During this time you are not allowed to sell the car," the lady explained patiently. "What? I need the new registration now. My car needs to go to Africa to be auctioned off for charity." I was devastated. She explained that first an official inquiry had to be made about for the registration before a replacement can be issued, and that the six weeks waiting period is mandatory. On top of that I was told that now that I had signed the affidavit I had to go through with the procedure and pay the €80, because now she knew that the registration document was missing. Great!

The Kraftahrzeugbrief

More panic struck me. In my desparation I already saw myself locked up in a run-down Moroccan prison for forging an official document without bribing officers properly. No water, no food, no toilet paper. The only thing that could save me: Find the damn Kraftfahrzeugbrief. In a mad hunt for the elusive needle in a haystack I went through all my files for the last 15 years, and checked every piece paper I had ever filed. The immense effort finally payed off: I found the darned piece in some totally unrelated papers from 1996. Goodbye you mean Moroccan prison guards, hello PBC!!!

tags: Plymouth-Banjul, Rallye, Aachen