Guide contents · Chapter 9 of 14
Roads, driving and routes
Tolls or the free roads: two ways to cross France
France gives you a genuine choice. The autoroutes (A-roads) are fast, superbly surfaced and tolled almost everywhere, run by companies like Vinci, APRR and Sanef. The N and D roads are free, slower, and take you through the France you actually came to see: plane-tree avenues, village squares, boulangeries.
Most coachbuilt motorhomes and high-top vans pay Class 2 at the péage (over 2m tall, under 3.5 tonnes), roughly half as much again as the car rate. Go over 3m tall or over 3.5 tonnes and you're Class 3, close to double the car rate: Paris to Marseille runs a Class 2 van around €110 in tolls and a Class 3 around €160 (operator figures, checked July 2026). In practice, a Channel-to-Mediterranean run costs a Class 2 van somewhere around €100–150 in tolls. Many travellers split the difference: autoroute for the long boring middle, D-roads once you're in the good bit. Toll booths take UK bank cards. One insider tip: height sensors sometimes misread a Class 2 van as Class 3. If the screen shows the wrong class, press the assistance button and contest it at the barrier.
Some autoroutes now have no barriers at all. On these free-flow (flux libre) routes, cameras read your plate as you pass under a gantry, and you must pay within 72 hours: online at sanef.com, by toll tag, or at a tabac in the Nirio network. The A13/A14 from Paris to Normandy (the main arrival route from Calais, Dieppe or Le Havre) and the A79 already work this way, with the contested A69 Toulouse–Castres set to follow when it fully opens; that project has been in and out of the courts, so check its status rather than planning around a date. UK plates are not exempt. Miss the window and a payment notice follows with a €90 penalty on top of the toll, cut to €10 if you settle within 15 days; leave it two months and it becomes a €375 fine (figures checked July 2026). A Bip&Go-style electronic tag covers barriers and free-flow alike, and saves queuing if you'll do this often.
Crit'Air stickers: buy once, buy official
More than forty French agglomerations now run a low-emission zone (ZFE): the loi Climat et Résilience requires one in every urban area over 150,000 people, and seven more joined on 1 January 2026. The list takes in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Grenoble, Toulouse, Montpellier, Strasbourg, Nice, Bordeaux, Lille, Nantes, Rennes and most other cities of any size. To drive into one you need a Crit'Air windscreen sticker showing your vehicle's emissions class. Only around a dozen zones currently enforce with fines, Lyon and Grenoble among them, but the requirement applies in all of them and enforcement is tightening year on year. You may have seen 2026 headlines saying France had scrapped its clean-air zones. Parliament did vote for abolition, but the Constitutional Council annulled it in May 2026: the zones and the sticker requirement still apply, so buy the sticker. The rules shift often, so check the current list before you travel if cities are on your route.
Buy only from the official government site: certificat-air.gouv.fr, which has an English version and accepts UK-registered vehicles. The sticker costs €3.72 delivered and lasts the life of the vehicle. Search engines are littered with lookalike sites charging €30 or more for the same thing. If the price isn't a few euros, you're on the wrong site.
Speed limits and the rain rule
Limits drop automatically when it rains, with no change to the signs. You're expected to know:
- Autoroutes: 130 km/h dry, 110 in rain
- Dual carriageways with a central barrier: 110 dry, 100 in rain
- Ordinary single-carriageway roads: 80 km/h by default, though some departments have restored 90 (follow the signs)
- Towns: 50, with widespread 30 zones
Drivers licensed under three years are held to the rain limits at all times. If your van is over 3.5 tonnes, lower limits apply again; check the rules for your weight class. Speed cameras are plentiful and unforgiving, and radar-detector functions must be disabled in French sat-nav apps.
Priorité à droite, honestly
The famous rule: at an unmarked junction, traffic joining from the right has priority, even a tiny lane joining a bigger road. On main roads it's mostly signed away: a yellow diamond sign means you have priority; the diamond with a black slash means you don't any more. Where it genuinely bites is in villages and towns, where a car can legitimately pull out from a side street on your right without stopping. If a junction has no signs, no white line and you're in a built-up area, assume the right has priority and cover the brake. Locals use it; tourists get caught out. It feels wrong to British instincts, which is exactly why it's worth drilling in before you go.
Bison Futé and the two weekends to avoid
France forecasts its own traffic jams. Bison Futé, the national traffic service, publishes a colour-coded calendar (green, orange, red, black) for every day of the summer, direction by direction. The French genuinely plan around it, and so should you.
The worst of it is the chassé-croisé: the changeover between July and August holidaymakers. The last Saturday of July and the first Saturday of August are routinely rated red or black nationwide. The first Saturday of August is the infamous "Black Saturday", the worst driving day of the year, with the A7 Rhône Valley and the A9 towards the Med at a crawl. If your dates land on either weekend, travel Friday or Sunday, or start before 6am. Otherwise, park the van somewhere pleasant and let France sit in the queue without you.
High vans: passes, bridges and weight limits
Mountain roads in the Alps and Pyrenees are mostly fine for motorhomes, but respect them: long descents want low gears and engine braking, not riding the brakes, and some classic cols are narrow with unguarded drops and awkward hairpins for anything over 7m. High passes can stay closed into June. Check before committing, and remember the big tunnels (Mont Blanc, Fréjus) charge motorhomes handsomely.
Heat punishes tyres, and a laden van doubly so. Check pressures cold before you travel, matched to the loaded weight on the plate, and never let air out of hot tyres. Before a southern summer trip check the date codes: tyres over about six years old are blowout-prone in 40°C heat, and long descents add heat of their own. Carry the means to check pressure on the road.
The quieter hazard is the D-road network: stone arch bridges, railway underpasses and village pinch-points signed for height, width or weight (3.5t limits through villages are common). Know your exact height in metres (stick it on the dashboard) and use a sat-nav with a camper profile rather than blindly following a car app. A five-minute detour is cheaper than a new roof.
Fuel and GPL on the road
Diesel is gazole; unleaded is SP95/E10 or SP98. Supermarket forecourts (E.Leclerc, Intermarché, Super U, Carrefour) are reliably the cheapest, often dramatically so compared with autoroute services, and most run 24-hour card-operated pumps. UK cards generally work, but the odd automated pump refuses them, so carry a second card and don't run the tank to fumes on a Sunday.
GPL (LPG) is widely available at supermarket stations and autoroute services, but French refilling rules are stricter than the UK's and tightening. Fixed, permanently installed tanks and plumbed-in refillable systems with an external filler (an installed Gaslow, for example) are legal to fill at GPL pumps. Portable refillable bottles (Safefill and similar) are prohibited at French pumps and routinely refused: do not plan a trip around one. Campingaz exchange or a plumbed-in system is the France-proof setup. Bring the right adapter for your system.
Fire season: when the road south closes
In high summer, wildfires can shut major roads in the south with almost no notice, including motorways. When a fire runs near the carriageway, the authorities impose rolling closures: a stretch of the A9, A61 or A63 closes, traffic is dumped onto already-busy D-roads, then it reopens hours later and closes somewhere else. Smoke across the road can stop traffic even where there's no closure.
The habit to build is simple: before any southern leg between June and September (Provence, Languedoc, the Rhône Valley, Corsica, and the Bordeaux–Landes run on the A10/A63), check live conditions that morning, not the night before. Official channels come first: an FR-Alert on your phone or instructions from the gendarmerie or mairie outrank everything, then the prefecture's daily risk map and Météo-France vigilance. For planning, our companion site europefiremap.com tracks active fires and heat conditions; sign up for the email briefing and the day's risk lands in your inbox before you've made coffee. Pair it with Bison Futé's live map and two minutes tells you whether today is the day to drive, or the day to stay by the pool. Once you can see or smell smoke, no website substitutes for turning around.