How do you import a million dollar car from Japan?

there have been a few things that i've shipped where i deliberately had them pull a spark plug or two because i knew that they would very enthusiastically rip the donuts in them [Music] i bring a fair number of cars in from japan on average i'd say probably bringing between eight and ten cars in a month of all varieties i mean not not every single one is a million dollar car they're all over the map and i'll tell you i'll get as excited about something that's 20 grand as i'll get excited about something that's 20 million and this is the case in any transaction i don't care where on earth you are the first the first thing that you have to be comfortable with is the car itself you know is it is it a good quality car is it what it's represented to be is it what you need it to be and in japan that can be rather difficult because there are a lot of cars that are represented as being low kilometer cars that just aren't i will say on record that there is a lot of odometer fraud that goes on a ton of it so you really have to be careful and you get what's known as a car you know a car vx report which is like their equivalent of carfax i mean stuff like that can help there there are a number of things that you can do to help verify things and or at least have some confidence so like for example on a car that i'll be exporting where it's it's possible to do it you get what's called a javik report which verifies that the kilometers are accurate to the best of its ability in the same way that the carfax is a representation of what they know about that card to the best of their abilities someone could have driven the car off a cliff and put it back together again if it wasn't reported to carfax they don't know there is a limit to how much you can find out but that's that's the same in japan as it is here that's that's a worldwide issue that's not a japan issue first and foremost you have to be comfortable with what you're getting then getting the car here you obviously need a trusted resource for just transporting the car every single car that leaves there needs to to go through what's known as a deregistration process which is you basically you're handing the license plates back the license plates have to get painted back in they get destroyed the original registration gets gets canceled and then they hand you export and de-registration paperwork it's a paperwork that you convert that then gets converted into a title upon arrival in the united states that is the that is the formal ownership document the same way that you know you have a french cart greece or a german farzig brief excuse my terrible pronunciation uk v5 it's it's that the deregistration paperwork is that equivalent then you need to figure out how badly and how quickly you want your car over here which in the last year has been an absolute nightmare so there's a car that i just bought earlier this week that is a very very significant car in amg world it's it's the baddest of the bad i bought it for a collection of amg cars that i have that i'm going to be putting together to sell as a collection and then a really good a really good client of mine got when that i bought this car and persuaded me into selling the car to him he wants the car here very quickly and it used to cost me about thirty thousand dollars to fly a car out of japan at its worst there was an f40 that i was buying out of japan and i was getting quotes between 125 to 150 000 to fly the car out of japan now remember thirty thousand dollars pre-pandemic 125-150 so now the prices have come back to a comparatively reasonable 80 to 95 000 to fly that car which is by the way crazy it's not a reflection of of car shipping if it's not a car it'll be pen ink it'll be any number of other things that get manufactured in japan that then get imported into the united states it's just a question of space and weight that is occupied on a plane but right now that space is at an insane premium not just on planes but an ocean freight then your next option is ocean freight i used to get 40 foot containers out of japan which you can comfortably fit two cars into if you really want to be aggressive you can fit three and tilt one up not my favorite thing to do my container costs used to be about forty five hundred dollars now they have come down to a comparatively reasonable eighteen to twenty thousand dollars but the thing that both ocean container freight and air freight offer is the security of knowing that your car is being truly handled in a white glove fashion which so if you're talking about investment grade and really really specialty stuff that's an option that i don't see you're limited to but it's certainly one that'll help you sleep at night and it's not to say that your third option is bad but it's just not as secure and option number three is what is known as roll-on roll-off shipping and that is where you literally have a dedicated car ship and the car as the name implies rolls on the ship gets strapped down and then on the other end rolls off and you're done now a roll-on roll-off ship it makes many stops along its route in many cases your car may get offloaded off of one ship and put onto another ship so and every time you move a car you're in you're introducing the possibility of risk you know if something have something happening something breaking an enthusiastic dock worker deciding that it's time to go rip the donuts in your car which there have been a few things that i've shipped where i deliberately had them pull a spark plug or two because i knew that they would very enthusiastically rip the donuts in them but that shipping is still comparatively very cheap i mean pre-pandemic an average car i was shipping was about eighteen hundred dollars to the new york area now it's about 26 2700 so obviously it's gone up but uh on a percentage basis it's gone up on an absolute basis compared to going from 4 500 to 20 grand or going from 30 grand to a hundred grand unless you absolutely need it you ship railroad and the reality is is that most of the time the cars get there no problem no issue it's how the vast majority of the cars that i'm bringing in get shipped part of the other reason just to jump back to ocean freight and even air freight is that just because you pay up for that container doesn't mean that your car is getting loaded on a container ship right away you need to wait for a spot on a container ship to get on there and at its worst i mean i was hearing reports of cars sitting in containers for 90 days before they got loaded in so you would then pay all this money have your car sit and sit in a container you know at the port near salty water baking without any end in sight and then it gets put onto a ship and which then takes six weeks if you're lucky to get to the new york area whereas the roll-on roll-off stuff usually was getting loaded in i mean at its worst there were times where we were waiting six weeks to get a car on but now it's usually two weeks cars on that in and of itself is an elimination of risk i don't want a car sitting in a container for three months anything can happen in three months i mean there could be a massive rat infestation that occurs i don't know to have the ability to get a car here quickly in this business is also very important you know you don't want to have your money tied up sitting in another country on a dock somewhere for 90 days when it could be put to other use so speed matters and those are the various ways that you get it here but then once it gets here then you have to take all of your paperwork your entry paperwork you know so your customs hs7 etc you then take all that paperwork and bring it to your local dmv and get it registered if you are in california i feel very bad for you unless you're registering out of state because california dmv is generally not going to accept any one of those cars pretty much everywhere else is relatively easy and they'll usually require a bin verification on the car for for you know fresh imports but that's not a japan thing that's an imported car thing you got issued your title and then you get to drive your car here now the one thing i'll say is that there are now certain states that are and i will say persecuting persecuting the owners of cars of a certain displacement so the cars that are known as k cars are being persecuted and now there are certain classes of cars namely the mitsubishi delica 4x4 wagons that that certain states are now revoking registrations because the cars are are non-compliant with nhtsa regulations which should not apply to cars over a certain age so they should not be allowed to take away your registration it's a state issue not a federal issue but regardless they're revoking registrations and it's incumbent upon the owners to fight back which is you're literally fighting city hall for people who have certain types of cars this is i would say this has become a threat and something that people in certain locations should exercise caution about but things like things like skyline gtrs are still being uh of a that are of legal age are still coming in no problem you know evos stis all the all the enthusiast gran turismo cars of the 80s 90s and well really up to 97 because that's what's allowed now those things are all still being allowed to exist you're no problem right now i need all of you to click the link in the description below and visit auto tempest not only is it the best place to shop for your next car but they're the ones that allow us to have so much fun doing car trek i hope that you enjoyed car trek eight we just released that on freddy's channel and now we're off to film nine and ten so seriously we can't do it without you guys supporting auto tempest so they can keep supporting benwicky and supporting car trek it's honestly where i start most of my days because it allows me to search all the major listing sites at the same time i find my cars faster much more easily and i find them in the nooks and crannies of the internet that i never would have found without auto-tempest [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 149,659

Keywords: matthew ivanhoe, the cultivated collector, vinwiki, car stories, japan, importing cars

Id: s5E0EO5NZE8

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022