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The article says the trip is "an 1,800-mile (3,000km) road trip across western Europe".

Are you allowed to drive around in self built vehicles in Europe? Or did they convince all countries they cross to give them a special permit?

How does that even work? When the polic stops them and says "The papers of the car please", they say "Hey, check this out, we have a letter from your chancellor who says we are cool to do this". Then how would the police even know how to check if that is legit?

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> Are you allowed to drive around in self built vehicles in Europe? Or did they convince all countries they cross to give them a special permit?

The car has been inspected by the RDW (Dutch vehicle authority) [1] and given a vehicle registration plate. So yes, they're allowed to drive around :)

[1] https://www.tue.nl/en/our-university/departments/biomedical-...

A common technique is the "car of Theseus": the rules for modified cars are often more relaxed, but you can quite drastically modify a car before you have to recertify it. It may be (and I can't find evidence either way) that they have a donor car with its original VIN as the chassis and have rebuilt that from the ground up.

In the UK at least, as long as you meet the requirements for road safety (which are remarkably little, for custom cars), you can register custom vehicles on the road. We have a wonderful history of insane people building cars in their sheds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DGtf7asP8I

Yes, you get it approved at the 'RDW'. Checking the plates (N-784-BX) at https://ovi.rdw.nl/ gives you a bit more info. Like, the list price of €4.235.000 :-)

The website says it's road legal and has a license plate: https://vita.solarteameindhoven.nl/

Here's a blog post from when they registered a previous car a few years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20210506002307/https://solarteam...

I think they have a genuine registration from the Netherlands that they can produce if someone stops them.

I think the rule is this: if your vehicle is considered roadworthy in one country as evidenced by passing a roadworthiness test, called an MOT test in the UK, Contrôle Technique in France, ITV in Spain (those are the ones I know) it will qualify for insurance. If it has passed a qualifying roadworthiness test, and is insured in one country, that is legally valid throughout Europe. There is in fact a larger agreement regarding insurance and roadworthiness that some nearby countries such as Morocco and Turkey also participate in, I'm afraid I don't recall its name right now.

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