As this is a fairly frequently asked question, I thought I would post our experience!

Last weekend we brought over to Alberta a 1991 Ford Bronco - so it's in the over 15 years class and can be classed as a truck - which according to the customs guys makes things a whole load easier. (Apparently some Escalades are on a truck chassis and some are on a SUV chassis, if you so chose to import one of those, try to get a truck).

72 hours prior to the export from America we had to fax to the US customs the title and bill of sale.

When we got to the US border we stated why we were entering the US, filled out our visa waivers, paid our money and away we went.

We collected the car (hubby was very pleased with it).

We drove back to the border and joined the horrendous queue, knowing we had to go back to US customs as well we weren't sure where we should go 1st, when we got towards the front of the queue, we saw a sign that would have helped if it was posted 45 minutes down the line

We come out of the queue and parked in the 15 min zone and wandered into US customs, they checked all was in order and away we went.

We rejoined the even longer queue - the Bronco doesn't like to be in queues and protested by starting to overheat - so in 34 degree heat hubby was sitting in a sweat box with the aircon off and the heater on full blast and driving along with the bonnet (hood) up, trying not to boil the engine - couldn't turn the engine off as we have found that the starter is on it's way out....I was behind him in a airconditioned Expedition....didn't offer to swap for a bit either

We finally got to the front of the queue and was directed into Canadian Customs. The paperwork was done and as the Bronco has aircon we had to pay an extra $200 tax - total we had to pay was around $500.

The total time to do the paperwork both sides was around 30 minutes but it took us around 3 hours to get through - wouldn't suggest crossing the border back to Canada on a Sunday night - only 1 window was open.

Hubby still very happy with Bronco and may well be importing another vehicle later this week/next week - going to try to get the shippers to bring it accross the border to Calgary though. It's a long drive from Red Deer to Sweetgrass.

Given your time, gas costs, taxes, exchange rate etc, were the savings worth the effort?

I am in the market for a Hot Tub and a Weber genesis BBQ, both substantially cheaper in the US as many places have not brought in newer lower cost inventory.

Border Shopping is back.

Did you see the recent piece in Macleans mentioning pricing - an example given that sticks in my mind was the Lexus that is 21,500 CAD more here than there! When asked about the difference, Lexus said "we price for our market"

http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?c..._106278_106278

I'm bringing my minivan over. It's a 1997 Plymouth Grand Voyager Rallye and the body work is in great nick as we've been living in Texas - no rust.

I'm sure it will fall apart the first winter here, but it seemed better to bring it (as the company are paying to move it, it's coming with a car transport company) as our younger boys are still pretty messy in the car and it didn't make sense to have to get a car loan to get a newer van, when the old one has a few years left in it.

The transport company only asked us for the title, I also got a recall notice but if they do want the bill of sale we might be stuck as that is in the moving van with the furniture (if we even have it, I bought the car four and a half years ago) and that won't be here until next week.

The only shipping company we could get last week was one that didn't have the right licence to bring it across the border, cost was around $1200 US. The car came from Texas and was shipped up to Sweetgrass, we collected it from there. As the exchange rate is almost dollar for dollar and the total taxes was only $500 and the car was a complete bargain of around $7000,00 less than we could get locally and rust free. The gas costs for 1 car down and 2 back were pretty steep - running to around $300.

The car hubby is negotiating with at present will hopefully be shipped to Calgary as was a previous vehicle - makes things so much easier and the outlay is roughly the same, we found out before that we may as well only get the car to Calgary rather than Red Deer as we have to sign paperwork at customs in Calgary.

Not sure if we would ever import anything new - so far it's only been classics and collector cars.

I can see us doing the shipping ourselves again - when you have a car nut for a hubby you have to go with the flow, at least car hunting these days doesn't involve traffic jams to get everywhere.

We have two cars from the US but we've left them on US plates.

We will need to insure the car and it will need an out of province check before we insure it, therefore we will need a new plate.

We've finally got around to doing something about one of the cars we have on US plates. It's a 2003 Honda and has been here a couple of years. I read all the websites and found them to be governmental; that is, confusing and probably not reflective of what actually happens. This is what's happened so far:

- per the RIV website I contacted the manufacturer to obtain a recall letter. What the website does not say is that in order to obtain the letter (at least from Honda) you have to provide proof that the owner is licensed in the US and the car is insured in the US. It was a bit of luck that the OH hasn't changed her driving license for an Ontario one.

- take the car to customs. The website implies that this has to be done at the border but it's not so, any customs office can issue the paperwork, "form 1" as it's called. You do have to go to the border if you want to formally export the vehicle from the US but the Canadian authorities don't care whether or not you do that. The owner of the car must be present and must produce documentation of status in Canada. Here we had another piece of luck, the website says that various duties and taxes are payable, a couple of hundred dollars total, however the customs officials said that since the driver is here on a work permit and does not have PR the taxes dont apply; theoretically the car might leave the country when the WP expires.

There's a customs office in Brampton so, while there, we went for a curry.

- take the car to Canadian Tire to have the headlamp switch disabled and get the form 1 stamped to say that the vehicle is compliant with the local laws. I'll try that tomorrow, previous experience with Canadian Tire suggests that they'll invent some safety fault and the bill will wipe out the tax saving but we'll see.

- according to the RIV office the form 1 and the recall letter can be faxed to them and they'll fax back form 2. Form 2 is used to get plates.

Is there no US customs involvement? I thought you had to get an export notice or something 72hrs in advance of car leaving the US (I guess it's not doing that in your case anyway?).

I seriously swithered about getting a car in the US last week, but ended up just leasing it in Canada. If it's as simple as you say, I'll definitely do it next time. Your process sounds less arduous than moving a car from another province!

Well, it's not done yet, but so far it seems simple enough. I don't know what advantage there might be to formally exporting the car from the US. I did ask about that (I called the border post at Port Huron) and was told that the usual method is:

- take car to Canada, use it for a bit

- fax title to border post

- 72 hours later drive out of Canada and in again formally exporting the car from the US

the logisitics of making that match with importing the car to Canada seemed daunting. I thought we could end up with the car not being registered in either place so my thought now is to finish the Canadian procedure and then sometime when we're driving to the US anyway export the car. We'll only export it though if some good reason for doing so comes up.

What sort of car did you lease?

We were always asked crossing into ND whose the car was, etc. Never asked here now that I think about it, didn't occur to me you could leave it unexported until now. The Canadians definitely don't want to see any export paperwork?

I'm embarrassed to tell you what I went for, lets just call it a locally-made luxobarge and say it makes the Kia look nippy

Not interested. Almost a point of pride not to care what the Americans think.

Perhaps an Oldsmobile or a Buick. Oh my, Windsor has aged you.

Cadilllac Escalade?

We've just done the out of province test. Technically we are not importing the car yet as we are on work permits so we got form one. We then had to take form one to a registry to buy a form which allows us to take the car to the garage for the test. This is in Alberta, I am not sure if this is the same everywhere.

The form to okay the inspection was just under $10 and we called around and the cheapest inspection price around here was $169, the test takes a couple of hours.

You don't have to use Canadian Tire for the out of province test in Alberta, Alberta infrastructure has a list of approved garages and we called around the ones on the list. I think when you are actually importing the car, you get a different form in the post, form 2 and you can't get the test without that.

In the end we had to replace all of our tires, I'm assuming this was something to do with heat as the tires were for Texas and it's a good deal colder up here. One of our rims had some damage that was perfectly allowable in Texas, but not so in Alberta so we had to buy a new rim and then switching to daylight running lights cost $246.

We had a few maintenance bits that needed doing, something else to do with the wheels, thankfully everything to do with the engine and emissions etc was fine but in the end it cost us $2060.00 - the car is probably only worth a bit more than that but we didn't want to buy a new car now while our kids are still messy ;-)