Electronic Driving License: We tried importing it into our phones (spoiler: it didn’t work)

“I swear to you, officer, I have a license, that’s for sure. But I forgot it at home, in my jacket. » You’ll now have to find a less-slammed excuse when you’re stopped by the police on your way home from a party. Because starting this Wednesday, you can exercise your right to drive just by presenting your cell phone.

How does it work? Pull into the emergency lane, turn on the warnings, turn off the ignition of your SUV (unless you’re in Paris) and pick up your iPhone 15 for 2,000 euros, 20 minutes

Explains the procedure to be followed.

Do not try to take a photo of your license, it will do no good. Let’s proceed according to the rules. To begin, you must download the France Identity app from the App Store or Play Store. Then, you go to the My Points Permis site, and you log in with your FranceConnect credentials (which you sometimes use to access the tax site). We click on “I have my driver’s license”, and we indicate what kind of document we have: an old-fashioned cardboard license, or a credit card format one.

“The service is temporarily unavailable”

Next step, you must indicate whether the document number fits on line one or two and whether the permit was issued before 1975 or not. Enter the permit number, accept the general terms of use and click on “Create My Account”. Phew! Your favorite reporter wonders if he still has his 12 points.

Then you must click on “My Documents” and “Download my RIR”. And… it doesn’t work. The following message is displayed: “Due to heavy traffic, the service is temporarily unavailable and it is impossible to generate your document. Please try again later. » Loser. New attempt. This time, we manage to download a PDF file that contains a QR code (the thing we had to show everywhere during Covid).

“Invalid Code”

We take our smartphones and launch the France Identity app. We select “Verifier Mode” and click on “Scan QR Code”. We scan on RIR and… it doesn’t work. “Invalid code”. Let’s try. again And also. New failures. Maybe it works better with iPhone. Try again with another phone. “Invalid code”. After investigation, it turns out that only drivers who also have an electronic identity card can use this service, which is not our case.

In short, the paper version of driving license still has a bright future ahead of it. Unless you forget it in your jacket.