ex_exile

NOooooooooo! Wont work

Funnily enough I am in the process of shipping my car at the mo, well talking to DOTAR about shipping it anyway, and they insist on 12 months "continuous" usage of the vehicle which for them means that in a 12 months (52 weeks) period you have used the car for 46 weeks.

This can be a bugger if you travel for work or have taken a long holiday but leaving the car in blighty for a couple of months and then claiming that you have owned it for 12 months will not fly as they are interested in your usage of said vehicle. They require you to send copies of ALL the pages of your passport to make sure that there is no cheating.

If you have travelled for work and can get signed evidence of this from your employer then they will take that time into consideration, DOTAR say that personal imports are dealt with on a case by case basis within the rules. They are a really friendly office actually and actually answer their phones!

If your car is landed in Australia without the proper paperwork its a $30,000 fine and shipped back to whenst it came.

EvannTel

The law is the law.
As you may know second hand car prices are high here but new is often cheaper. Which if you think about it is a good thing - think of all the depreciation you lose in UK? Not so the case here.

bigAPE

Yep, this is exactly what I had to do with my car. It was the same and as I mentioned I had owned for seven years! Had to get letters for my employer for every overseas business trip and documents detailing every day away from the UK in the time I owned it. It all had to be notorised too, what a pain in the arse. BUT that's just the tip of the iceberg, wait till you get the car here and try to get it on the road. That's where the real fun starts. Temporary registration, customs release paperwork, quarantine release paperwork, dock release paperwork, vehicle inspections for Australian standards paperwork, vehicle inspection for registration paperwork, Personal Import Plate paperwork, vehicle registration paperwork and that's without anything being done most of those have physical inspections. Then there is all the costs involved... not least of which is the big sting, when you register the car you're charged Motor Duty at 4% of value because as far as they are concerned you have just bought the car!

In the last year since I wrote that article and it was posted on several of the expat forums I have spoken to hundreds of people looking at taking their cars over and for almost all (with the exception of a couple) it just wasn't worth it. You will break even at best and at worst come out losing money in the transfer. The only way you win is if you have either a classic car, a car which you simply can't leave behind for emotional reasons (but expect to break even at best) or its one of a number of very old cars which oddly are worth substantially more here (I know of only one so far)

In short, you need to do your research before you start the shipping process and don't just listen to the shipping agents who where all off by around £3k when they got end-to-end estimates for me, those that even bothered to guess I should add.