77hil

I'm looking at shipping may car over for these exact reasons. It's a convertable Smart. To sell it here I'd get about £4500. Converted that's $7500. To buy another used one in Oz I'm looking at $15,000. It just doesnt make sense to sell it.

dave7370

Add on another about £3500 to get it to your door (shipping, taxes, duty, engineer's report, roadworthy etc) and that makes £8000, which at todays rate is about $13800.

Still worth it?

77hil

Your calculations seem higher than mine.

dave7370

If you're going on value here to over there then the difference is huge, but have you factored in the cost of shipping and all other associated costs of importing the car? My estimate is just that, an estimate...... but if you're going on the value comparison alone then you're making a mistake I'm afraid.

Unless you own something like a BMW then only then does it make sense financially. For example a 2001 BMW 540i Sport can be bought here for £5000, they're selling in Oz for the equivilent year for $30000.

For the sake of possibly a $1000 - 1500 saving and the hassle of everything involved is such a saving worth it?

Edit: the values I've quoted are just to illustrate that you need to do far more investigation into ALL the costs of shipping a car, not just go on like for like values.

Pollyana

Do a search for posts by a guy going by the name of BigApe - he has done a lot of research on the subject, and there's not much he doesn't know......

77hil

I do realise that there are additional costs including the shipping, taxes, duty, registration etc. I have do my reaserch. Cheers.

77hil

Cheers Pollyana. Will take a look at his posts.

craig_m67

No it doesn't. I was trying to open up the discussion, add some detail in case anybody else searched through.
With regards importing a car. I brought in my '03 Alfa 156 Sportwagon (1.9JTD) last year. Total costs A$ 6503.33

Given vehicle and ability your $mileage$ may vary.
Biggest hassle is insurance (majors won't touch you).. It's not imposible though and it wasn't more expensive in my case.

Alfresco

Why do you add the £3500 shipping cost onto the selling price in the UK is he's not selling?

The only cost would be the £3500 (if that) to ship to Oz = $5810 not $13800.

If he sold in the UK and got £4500 = $7500. It would still cost another $7500 to buy the $15000 car.

But if he shipped, it would only cost £3500 (I believe way less) = $5800 saving $1700 approx.

dave7370

I added it on as the real total cost needs to include what was paid for the car in the first place, and as I have no idea what the purchase price was of the posters Smart then I used the selling valuation as a guide.

Last time I bought a car money was used to buy it...... unless cars are now free and I've missed out.

Edit: I'm not starting an argument but to base the savings to be made on valuations alone is foolish, unless indeed the car was free to begin with.

Alfresco

Why?

Sorry I also don't want to argue either, but the original cost of the car or current value is completely irrelevant to the cost of shipping (except for duty based on it's value).

If you own the car outright (it's yours, you owe nothing on it, nada) why then sell it for less than half price of the equivalent car in Oz and then go an buy the same thing for twice the money in Oz?

Maybe I'm not explaining myself very well.

I think this is why people say it's not worth shipping cars to Oz because the maths is wrong.

e.g. If I own a Rolls Royce originally bought for £100 000 and it's mine and I own nothing on it now and it is now worth only £50 000 after 10 years of ownership. I just got my visa and now I want to ship it to Oz, I don't add the shipping cost of say £5000 onto £50 000 i.e. £55 000 and say that's what it costs me to ship it to Oz.

The only shipping cost is £5000 nothing more, nothing less, irrespective of the value of the car.

I have added a small spreadsheet to try and explain.

dave7370

We'll just have to agree to disagree.

confused.pom

Could someone please clarify this for me? Could I purchase a car in the UK, say a month before emigrating to Oz, then once the car has been registered to me for 12 months, ship it over?

Many thanks.

sean bassett

no you cant simply as

sfr09

The other consideration is whether your car manufacturer will honour the full warranty.

We discovered to our cost that VW did not honour the third year warranty stating it is only a 2 year warranty in the UK for an "import", despite of course all VW's in the UK are imports!