Tim's car recently celebrated its tenth birthday, which under Norwegian rules makes it eligable to install more seats and change the colour of its number plate.
We've mentioned before the special system of duty payments, by which a car is subject to a tax which works out at about 100% of its value, when it's imported into Norway.
There are however some ways of getting around the rules.
One is to register the car as a commercial vehicle - but then it can only have two seats and must have a solid barrier behind them to create a separate "cargo area" which must be of a certain size.
Doing this halves the amount of the duty, which makes the car a great deal cheaper.
This is the reason that there are many fancy estate cars (BMWs and the like) in Norway with only two seats and green number plates (which denote a commercial vehicle).
You have to be careful, though.
The other week a woman in a Volvo estate car was stopped by the police, who found that the barrier behind the driver's seat had become slightly twisted when she leaned her seat back against it and had bent a couple of millimetres.
She was fined over �10000 because the car was deemed to no longer fulfil the criteria for a commercial vehicle.
After ten years, however, a commercial vehicle can be converted into a passenger vehicle without paying the duty -
so Tim's car celebrated its birthday by removing the barrier, installing a back seat (the one we collected from Beth's last week) and re-registering it - hence the new, white, number plates.
(3 pictures below).
