Deregister first, or sell it still registered?

Registration is not an administrative detail but the link between your name and the car. Three things hang on it at once: third-party insurance, the tax or cantonal charge, and the attribution of every offence recorded by the plate. All three continue until registration ends — not until the contract is signed.

That is the whole core of the matter. Sell it registered and you hand over a drivable car while keeping, for a while, a risk you cannot control. Sell it deregistered and you shed the risk at once, but you are selling something the buyer can neither test drive nor simply drive away.

The plates themselves are not part of the car, even though they are bolted to it. In Switzerland plates are assigned to the keeper, not the vehicle; in Germany the plate is de-stamped on deregistration and thereby loses validity. In both cases it is a mistake to simply hand them over and trust the buyer to sort it out.

In Germany you deregister the vehicle at the registration office. The plates are de-stamped, part I of the registration certificate is annotated, and from that moment tax and insurance obligations end. The office passes the decommissioning on; you generally need not tell your insurer yourself, but it is better to do so anyway.

In Switzerland you hand the plates back to the cantonal road traffic office, or deposit them there if you want to keep them for your next car. Handing them in ends insurance cover, and the road charge is settled pro rata. The vehicle document goes with them; it no longer entitles anyone to drive, but it remains the paper the buyer needs to put the car back on the road.

The price of this route is the test drive. A prospect who may not drive either does not buy at all or buys far more cautiously — and on a mid-priced car that costs more than any liability you save. So a deregistered sale is right mainly where nobody would drive anyway: a project car, an accident vehicle, a car without a valid test.

For moving an unregistered vehicle there is a solution in both countries, and the buyer should have arranged it before handover, not after. Driving off without registration and without cover is not merely an offence but a drive with no liability protection — and if something happens, the case reaches far beyond the value of the car.

Who arranges it belongs in the contract. The usual and sensible arrangement is that the buyer handles it and bears the cost — he is the one deciding where the car goes. But you should be told before the appointment which route he has chosen, because a buyer without a plan ends up asking whether he could not just use your plates for a quick run.

A registered car can be shown, driven and taken away the same day. That reaches far more prospects and spares you the conversations where the price gets talked down for lack of a test drive. On a well-kept car with a valid test, this is the normal route.

The difference comes afterwards. Once the buyer has driven off, everything depends on his actually re-registering the car, and promptly. If he does not, your premium and your charge keep running, and every fine, parking charge and toll demand lands in your letterbox first.

So re-registration is not a wish but a contractual duty. Write into the document by when the buyer must re-register, and have him send you a copy of his ID and of the new registration. A buyer who refuses either does not intend to re-register or is not who he says he is.

In Germany the instrument is called a notice of sale. You tell the registration office in writing whom you sold to and when, with name, address and the vehicle data, enclosing a copy of the contract. The office can then write to the buyer directly, and your name is no longer the only one in the file.

In Switzerland the equivalent route runs through the plates. As long as the plates are in your name, the link remains — a note to the road traffic office does not replace that. So anyone selling a registered car in Switzerland normally hands the plates back at handover and lets the buyer register it on his own.

In both countries the insurer belongs in the loop, on the day of handover and not the week after. A policy still running on a sold car costs more than premium; in the event of a claim it creates a situation in which nobody knows who answers for what.

Whichever route you take, the contract decides whether the transfer is cleanly documented. The following details take five minutes and are exactly the ones missing when a dispute starts.

One entry is worth more than the rest together: the time. Fines, tolls and parking charges are recorded to the day, and without a time in the contract a demand from the day of handover cannot be attributed. Yet that is exactly the day on which the buyer covers his first kilometres.

First: does the car have a valid test and drive without complaint? If so, nearly everything argues for selling it registered, because the test drive is what makes the price. If not, deregistering costs you little and buys you calm.

Second: how far away does the buyer live? A local buyer re-registers; one who has come a long way and wants to drive back the same evening needs a drivable, insured car — and you need the plate arrangement settled beforehand, not in the car park.

Third: how long can you live with an open risk? Anyone selling abroad, selling to a trader with no local base, or handing over a car that will obviously cover many more kilometres is better off deregistering. The enquiries lost are the price of a matter that is then closed.

The costliest mistake is not the wrong choice but the half-made one: car handed over registered, plates given away, contract without a time, buyer noted down with a first name and a mobile number. That combination is more common than you would think, and it regularly ends in penalty notices from another country.

The countermeasure costs nothing. Photograph the ID, fill out the contract completely, record the handover with a time, settle the plate question beforehand and tell your insurer the same day. After that it barely matters which of the two routes you chose.