I didn't expect the Spanish inspection

It was that time at last. For over three years, I’d been able to avoid thinking about it. But now it was upon me, unavoidable, irreversible, unstoppable.

Our car had been registered for the first in November 2018. Here we were in November 2022. Under Spanish law, it had to undergo its Technical Vehicle Inspection (ITV) and there was no way to duck that duty.

At first, I thought I’d done well, even got ahead of the game. When the letter showed up (yep, snailmail) telling me that the car had to go to the ITV before the end of the month, I smiled with self-satisfaction. I’d already been online (yes! Some of these things are available online these days) and booked in for an inspection.

Sadly, my self-satisfaction was premature and unjustified. It was only on the day of the appointment itself that I realised that, despite having a huge wad of papers for the car, I was missing one crucial document. I didn’t have a certificate for the car issued by the ITV.

But could they really expect one? After all, I was taking the car in for its first inspection. How could I have a certificate before getting it inspected? It was time to leave, so I chose to assume the requirement for the certificate was wrong, or at least incorrectly applied to a car that had not yet had an inspection.

It turns out I was the one who’d got it wrong.

“Where’s the ITV certificate?” the receptionist asked me. 

She was polite about it – I’d specifically chosen that ITV office in the hope that they’d be a little kinder towards a foreigner and non-native speaker of Spanish than the one closer to us, where I’d had an unpleasant experience on a different matter – but, polite or not, she was firm. My explanation that I didn’t have the certificate and maybe never had, cut no ice at all.

“Every car in Spain is issued with one. Otherwise, it isn’t authorised to be driven on Spanish roads.”

How could I get one?

“You have to contact the DGT.”

That’s the Directorate General of Transport. My heart sank. Another bureaucracy? How long would that take?

“Can they issue one at once?”

She shrugged.

“I think they might,” she said, with a total lack of confidence which inspired absolutely no confidence in me. 

A department of the Spanish state that would see me immediately without an appointment? And that would issue the necessary document at once? About as likely as a British Prime Minister announcing that the country got it wrong about Brexit and doing the sensible thing of requesting readmission to the EU on whatever conditions the other members set.

“Do I need a new appointment with you?” I asked.

She smiled, which was pleasant and confirmed I’d been right to choose this office over the other one.

“If you get back anytime today, we’ll do the inspection.”

Back home I went. Danielle went through all our papers looking for the wretched certificate, unsuccesffully. I went online to see what if anything the DGT offered as a possible solution. And that’s when things started to look up.

Well, look up slowly. Very slowly. I clicked on the button for ‘issue a new copy of the ITV certificate”. It asked me for a username and password.

That meant going to the clever and ostensibly secure system I use to store passwords (God knows what I’ll do if it ever gets hacked). Armed with the username and password, back I went and typed them in.

“Your password is out of date. Please create a new one,” the system told me. I’m not sure it actually said ‘please’.

I went through the password change function and discovered that I needed the ‘activation code’. Fortunately, I had a record of that too, also in my secure repository of passwords and the like. Back there I went and found the code. I typed it in, not without apprehension: what if they said that it too was now out of date?

It turns out it wasn’t. I created a new, secure and totally unmemorable password. Instead of logging me in straight away, however, the system then took me back to the login page, so I entered my (memorable) username and my (unmemorable) new password. I was in.

And what did I learn? With the app ‘miDGT’ (‘myDGT’) I could download a copy of my ITV certificate anytime I wanted.

Over to my phone I went. I found the app and downloaded it. It also wanted a username and password. “No problem,” I thought, “I can use my memorable username and my nice, new unmemorable password”.

Of course, that meant looking up the password again, but I did that and typed it in.

“Incorrect access data,” I was told. Peremptorily, I thought. I tried several times, but without success. I then tried the old, tired password, but that didn’t work either.

So I created the second new password of the day.

That worked.

I downloaded the certificate and printed out a copy, in case the ITV person wanted a hard copy.

Back I went to the office.

She did indeed prefer the hard copy.

“But,” she said, “where’s the white sheet that goes with the certificate?”

I showed her my phone (before I got out of the car, I’d logged in again, against just this eventuality). She looked at various functions offered by “miDGT”. None provided what she wanted.

“Look,” I pointed out, “both the app and the printed versions of the certificate include a QR code. Maybe that would give you what you want?”

“Maybe it would,” she agreed, “if we had a QR reader.” 

Ah, well. The DGT and the ITV are related but separate branches of government. No reason to suppose that just because one of them starts using QR codes, the other will be able to read them.

I didn’t say that, though. It occurred to me that it might not be tactful. And not being tactful was, I reckoned, a sure way of not getting the cooperation I wanted.

I was right.

“Hold on,” she said. 

Choirs of angels began to sing in my mind. When a Spanish bureaucrat tells you to hold on, it means they have a potential solution in mind. If they didn’t, they’d just send you away.

Indeed, she had a solution. After tapping away at her computer keyboard, she printed out a copy of the form she needed, to go with the certificate. I paid my fee. And, at last, the process was under way.

It still took an hour – 45 minutes sitting in a queue, fifteen minutes for the actual inspection – but now I’m the proud possessor of a windscreen sticker saying that our car is OK for another twelve months.

The car. With its ITV sticker. A badge of pride.
Which proved less easy to obtain than I might have hoped

Imagine my relief.

At least next time, I’ll have a better idea of what to do. Plus, I’ve had further confirmation of the fact that Spain is moving firmly into the twenty-first century. The bureaucracy is getting web-enabled. 

And it works almost smoothly.