Where to get pollution stickers for foreign vehicles

DRIVERS with non-French number-plates can buy official pollution stickers to make driving easier in towns and cities which impose driving restrictions during pollution peaks.

The Crit’air site is in English and should be an easy-to-use process with the only complication being having a scan or a photograph (use a smartphone) of your vehicle registration document.

However, the RAC in the UK has done its own tests and found the stickers were slow to arrive: it ordered a sticker on February 6 and it did not arrive until March 16, when the site says it should take a maximum of 30 days.

Even French drivers have reported delays and some have taken to sticking the 'recipissé' email receipt in their windscreen.

Drivers should give details of their vehicle, the source of energy and the Euro standard that it meets (from Euro 1-6 which should be on the registration document) then the site will calculate which Crit’air vignette is applicable.

A petrol-engined car, with a Euro 3 rating will receive a yellow Crit’air 3 sticker – and this would have given access to Paris and other cities such as Lyon and Grenoble during the last pollution peak.

The stickers are posted out to the address on the registration document and cost €4.80 to an address in Europe. They are for every road vehicle, including two or three-wheeled vehicles, quadricycles, private vehicles, commercial vehicles, heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches. Foreign-registered vehicles are also included.

Diesel cars registered before 1997 are too old to qualify for a sticker (as are pre-1997 vans and pre-1999 motorbikes) and are banned from Paris streets from 8.00-20.00 Monday-Friday.

The stickers are only mandatory in Paris where drivers without one may be stopped and checked by police and city agents but drivers of pre-1997 cars or vans or pre-1999 motorbikes could face fines from €68 to €135.