Far too expensive, mate bought a similar car for £400 for his works car, ran for a couple of years.

I wouldn't go near a vehicle with 190K on the clock unless it has been exceptionally well looked after, especially with a towbar.

You would never buy many s/h cars in France then, 300,000 km and more is common on old cars on LeBoncoin and ebay.

But one only needs to visit France to see that the French have a completely different attitude to cars ....

And how do French MOT tests compare to the UK?

Much the same as both are to EU standards AFAIR.

Pretty automated nowadays, the braking, emission, headlamp alignment results are all printed out on the pass/ fail sheet automatically the testers all have a handheld gadget that communicates with the computer in the office that prints out the sheets, but I guess the UK does that nowadays too.

But only testing stations do them, not allowed to do repairs, so no made up faults.

They start at 4 years from 1st registration and are then every other year - for cars.

Light commercials get a full test every other year and an emission test in between.

If a vehicle fails you have two months to fix it and go back to have that fault retested, but that doesn't prohibit you from using it, unless it's a dangerous fault in which case you have to recover it on a trailer back to your garage or the caisse (scrappy).

There is also a new tougher category of fault since 2018 which means the car cannot be used after midnight on the day of the test if it has not been repaired.

If you sell a vehicle privately it must have a valid certificate that was done within the previous 6 months, otherwise the buyer will not be able to register it.

And you get a sticker in the windscreen and also one in the registration card so you can see at a glance the test record of any car.