As with Barcelona (and many other cities in Europe), London, the destination of TWIKE560’s adventure this year has introduced fees to enter certain parts of the city.
London’s road charging zones are a patchwork of eco-driven bureaucracy: there’s the LEZ (Low Emission Zone), the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone), and adding to this, the Congestion Charge Zone in the middle: all designed to discourage high-emission vehicles from entering the innermost parts of the capital.
As an EV enthusiast wanting to get my TWIKE right into the heart of London and wanting to get those must-have shots with Big Ben and Buckingham Palace — I definitely wanted to get the paperwork sorted.
That meant registering my TWIKE with TfL – Transport for London – , just as I’ve done in a few other European cities with low-emission schemes.
I assumed this would be a quick formality. After all, it’s the UK — a nation known for rules, order, and roundabouts.
But, as it turns out, navigating TfL’s systems as a foreign vehicle owner is difficult and not straightforward
I’ll spare you the full saga, but here’s the gist:
To register a foreign-registered vehicle, the process starts with setting up a Road User Charging account. Once that’s done, you can add your vehicle and get the appropriate exemptions sorted.
Simple, right?
Wrong.
Each attempt to register failed with an error message claiming that my phone number was already in use on another account — even when I tried entirely different numbers. No matter what number I entered, the system insisted: “something went wrong.”
Desperate, I called in reinforcements — Alan, a long-time blog reader and UK resident, who registered an account under his name: Lo and behold, he had no issues registering. So I added TW560 to his account just to get things moving.
Meanwhile, my own TfL support ticket slowly crawled through the system. Much later, I finally got a response from their Contracts & Operations Manager.
The root cause? A non-mandatory field that UK users usually complete by default — but which wasn’t marked as required for us foreign users. Once I provided some random data… Bob’s your uncle.
So, if you’re looking to bring your EV into London, buckle up — here’s how to (actually) register your vehicle with TfL…
Next let’s take this to the next step.
So, how to we register for the ULEZ?
So then, let’s get the vehicle registered.
What? Photos of all sides …and interior? WTF?
Well, here we go, all data uploaded and additional information provided.
Here we go!
Let’s hope for the best!
And finally, the application is in progress. Let’s hope we can get TW560 registered in time!
In the meanwhile I thought it would be cool to use AI to generate a vision of how it would look like when TW560 enters London in a sunlit, warm evening setting.
See the prompt and then… the confirmation that a TWIKE is AI-proof!
Enjoy!