Many companies in Germany who provide their employees with company cars do not actually buy the cars outright, instead they prefer to lease them and my company car is no exception.

By leasing the car, I pay a monthly fee to a leasing company, often a bank, who have purchased the vehicle from my usual dealer.  That fee allows me to drive the car up to an agreed number of kilometres each year.

And when the lease runs out, I just return the car to the dealer and can lease a new one.

Buy why not buy the car outright as a business and then sell it again later?

> Continue reading at AllThingsGerman.net

A new law in Germany has tightened the rules on the types of tyres that you can use in winter.

Until now, the law only said that you had to have “suitable” tyres for the road conditions, but did not actually specify that you had to have winter tyres on in winter.  Indeed, many people with good tread on their summer tyres continued to use them throughout the winter, and would probably argue that they were suitable as long as the main roads were clear.

The trouble was, that unless they caused an accident, the police were as good as powerless to argue against them, so the politicians were under pressure to amend the law to get things clarified.

Unfortunately, they made quite a mess of it.

For a start, they only agreed on it at the end of November, giving many people only a few days to change the tyres on their cars before it came into effect.

It would not have been so bad, if it wasn’t for the fact that the first snow was already on the ground.  At that is still part of the problem – the new rules still only apply for particular road conditions, ie. when there is snow, ice, slush, black ice, and a number of other variants of frozen water on the ground.

The M+S symbol

> Continue reading at AllThingsGerman.net

I learnt a valuable lesson last weekend: you can’t park in Düsseldorf on a Sunday.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true, but it’s definitely not easy.

Last Sunday I wanted to hear Cathy Dobson’s public reading from her book “Planet Germany“.  I left in plenty of time.  Driving to Düsseldorf is usually a matter of about 2½ hours.  A bit more if I hit Cologne around the rush hour, but not on a Sunday.  Not on a public holiday.

But I decided to allow myself plenty of time anyway, and left home 4 hours before the reading was due to start.

The only trouble was, that the motorway to the east of Cologne was closed to allow a bridge to be removed!

> Continue reading at AllThingsGerman.net

I’m not sure if it’s just the summer heat, but it seems to me that people’s attention for simple rules of the road has gone out of the window lately.

It all started with the bicycles.  We’ve noticed this year a lack of respect on the part of cyclists for red lights.

It doesn’t matter what kind of red light: pedestrian crossings, crossroads, or even cycle paths.  They just ride straight through them.  It’s a common occurance on the Hohemarkstraße in Oberursel, where I see at least one cyclist every week go through at red light – usually whilst pedestrians are crossing.

But at crossings it can be even worst – they veer off to the right to use the pedestrian crossing across the side road and avoid the red traffic light that way.  Of course, the pedestrian crossing may also be at red, but that doesn’t seem to worry them.

Then there are the pedestrians who just walk across the main road without looking, forcing drivers to brake hard.  And I don’t mean taking a run at it, I mean leisurely walking across.

> Continue reading at AllThingsGerman.net