I'm buying a new car and when I get it I am gifting my current car to my daughter who is permanently resident in Valencia in Spain (has legal 'residencia') and she has a Spanish driving licence. My current car is 10 years old, 90,000+ miles, value c£1,600. I am current Registered Keeper, it's taxed and MOT'd, and insured in my name [daughter not a named driver].
Daughter plans to re-register it in Spain, get Spanish number plates for it, and make it fully Spanish-compliant with whatever the Spanish equivalents of MOT and car tax are. It's a second car for her, she already has one car, Spanish number plates, which she insures etc there.
The plan is that I will drive it down to Valencia, spend a few days there, then fly back leaving the car with her. I will give her a letter confirming I have transferred ownership to her. She will then add it to her Spanish motor insurance policy while she gets it re-registered. As soon as I get back to the UK I will cancel my UK insurance on it and notify DVLA.
As far as the DVLA is concerned it looks like all I need to do is return Section 11 'Notification of permanent export' of the V5C to DVLA and give the rest of the V5C (sections 1 - 8 anyway) to my daughter as it may be needed by the Spanish authorities to do the re-registration. DVLA will then cancel the car tax and return to me whatever amount of the unused tax I am entitled to. As I've decalred it permanently exported I don't need to SORN and they shouldn't be chasing me because it will no longer be listed as taxed or insured on their UK databases.
Does that sound right? Anything I have missed?
However a Spanish company (run by Brits) that advises ex-pats on re-registering UK cars in Spain has given some different advice that has confused us. They suggest I re-register it with DVLA in my daughter's name in the UK before taking it Spain. This seems an unnecessarily complicated way of doing it. And technically not even possible as she has no UK address and DVLA won't register a UK car to a non-UK resident will they? Registering to her name at my address would be the work-around but I'm not seeing the need.
What they said is: "Whenever you change the registered keeper of a UK the vehicle the road tax is cancelled. As such it would be better to change the name in the UK and re tax the car before you come to Spain" but that seems to misunderstand what we are planning to do. The cancelling of the UK car tax is intended!
Does anyone have any experience of this?