I know that french generally hate travelling to places that don't speak french, but if you ever did by car and didn't have all papers in order, you may be in fo

I know that french generally hate travelling to places that don't speak french, but if you ever did by car and didn't have all papers in order, you may be in for a big surprise. Ie Switzerland, they do frequent background checks especially on foreign plates, I'd say you have 20-30% chance of being checked on average as french on each crossing. With covid, practically any border crossing within Europe had 100% mandatory checks for certain parts of 2020 and 2021, and they often went deeper than just valid covid papers. Also, France is a mess in quite a few aspects so not surprising when some bureaucracy doesn't work as intended (ie colleague who moved from Belgium ended up in dead-end process when migrating his driving license, literally the law covering his situation was so badly written it didn't make it possible at all to migrate his driving license to French one). In Switzerland, no car dealer would give you keys to the car before having mandatory 3rd party damage insurance. Once you stop paying, all sorts of automated plate scanners would mark you and you would receive a massive fine, and probably a visit to court that would take your license for some time on top of that. I mean they take license for driving more than 20kmh over limit in certain situations.