Buying the car is the easy part. What stops people at the traffic counter is a missing document or an age below the limit. The General Traffic Department publishes the conditions for registering new vehicles on its site: seven items and one fee.
The fee: five dinars
That is all you pay traffic for the registration. Any other amount you pay — insurance, inspection, an office’s charge — is not the registration fee.
The seven conditions as published
- The vehicle’s mechanical certificate issued by customs.
- Presenting the vehicle for technical inspection at the international standards section in the capital, for vehicles imported by individuals, local companies and car offices.
- Vehicles imported by dealerships are exempt from technical inspection for three years, provided the dealership undertakes that the chassis number and details are correct.
- A vehicle is not registered to anyone under twenty-one.
- Insurance.
- A letter from the dealership, signed and stamped by it, with the signature attested by traffic.
- The new owner’s civil ID and a copy of it.
The items that actually change your order of operations
Where did you buy it? Items two and three together split buyers in two. Anyone who bought from an approved dealership does not go to technical inspection at all during the first three years. Anyone who imported privately, or bought from a car office or a local company, presents the vehicle at the international standards section in the capital before anything else.
The age of twenty-one. The condition is on registration, not on driving. So someone below that age may hold a licence and still not have a vehicle registered in their name; it is registered to a parent or another owner.
The dealership letter and signature attestation. It is not enough for the letter to be signed and stamped. The signature itself needs prior attestation with traffic — a one-off step on the dealership’s side, but a well-known reason for a transaction being deferred if it is not already in place.
What the page does not say
The page gives no processing time, and does not say whether the transaction can be done at any traffic department or at the governorate’s. Ask the office or the department before going, and take the original and a copy of every document.
Source: the General Traffic Department, Ministry of Interior, page on new vehicle procedures.
Photo: the Fourth Ring Road, 2009. By Ahmadk, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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