Sorry if this is a repeat question, but I did not find a relevant thread.

My wife and I are resident here, and my wife has a car in the UK (parked with her parents).

It seems that standard UK car insurance only covers car-owners who are resident in the UK. Is there any way that my wife can get insurance for her car in the UK while being resident here in Switzerland? She will use the car whenever she is in the UK.

I tried a couple of insurance companies without any luck or leads, so I am asking here.

By the way we discovered this when applying for a Swiss license - it it correct that she has to give up her UK driving license in order to obtain a Swiss driving license?

Thanks for any help.

It is a repeat question

Try http://www.nvc.ch/ for UK registered vehicles.

Change the V5 so that your wife AND one of her parents are registered keepers (doesn't add any extra keepers to the history), then get the parent to insure the car with your wife as named driver, or for all drivers over 25 yrs old, that sort of thing.

Driving licence - yes, they take your UK one and return it to the DVLA. The Swiss one's much nicer; a lovely neat little plastic card without all that silly paper nonsense.

kodokan

Thanks rdiggle but I cannot nail down the existing thread. Is it recent or old? I'll check out NVC.

@kudokan - good suggestion but both of my wife's parents are off the road, so this might be tricky. As for replacing paper with cards, I am all for it. We arrived in Nov last year and got large paper Swiss identity cards. I think I read that plastic ID cards came into circulation soon after - I keep meaning to check if I can do a swap.

Oh, I'm with you on the permit thing, we just missed the change too.

Incidentally, when your wife changes her driving licence, would she like to keep all the additional categories for driving larger vans, minibuses, etc? If she just does the standard 'eye test, fill in a form' thing, she'll only receive a licence with a category for cars. I did a post about this on the Sticky thread about changing licences:

[Drivers licence] Conversion and questions

(Not sure how that link will paste, my post's about halfway down page 18)

It's not terribly complicated, just a few more admin hoops to jump through, but otherwise when you go back to the UK she may find she's lost those categories for ever - the DVLA hasn't given them out automatically with new licences since about the mid-1990s.

kodokan

Thanks much for the information. This explains some things that I was missing (not speaking German, or being able to read my post, is getting tired - I start with Berlitz next month). Your description of the medical in the other thread reminded me of something else, although it may be slightly OT here. I found a doctor and booked an annual physical and I was told it will take about an hour. I know the Swiss aim for high-quality and are thorough. But an hour...?!

The plastic ID card is for Swiss nationals only; it's been like this for over ten years. B and C permits to my knowledge still come in paper. Sorry...

Sounds about right. From memory, my driving licence one took about 40 mins, and involved a long chat about my medical history and current lifestyle, blood pressure, listening to heart and lungs, checking skeletal alignment and so on. My 4 yr old had a similar one to start kindergarten! My medical cost around 120 chfs.

If you need to change your licence too, you can combine the medicals to save costs - my husband did this with his driving one and another one to join the company pension scheme. All they do for the driving licence is stamp and sign the licence application form, so as long as they've actually done the medical, even if it's technically for something else, that's fine. I think his was a little longer because it also involved blood tests (to make sure he wasn't going to keel over dead before retirement and cost the company money).

kodokan