The Important Research You Must Complete Before You Get Any Used Vehicles from Japan
Assuming you have read this far, then you must be at least a little bit interested in buying used vehicles from Japan. After all, their lower KM, higher quality and competitive pricing make them an enticing option. However, as I wrote earlier, there are several things you have to be sure you carry out first:
Before you take one more step, you need to be sure that you can definitely bring in vehicles from Japan. There are not many countries that proscribe imports of secondhand vehicles completely, but there are many times legal barriers you have to jump.
There are quite often limitations on the age of the used car. Examples of this would be Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that both restrict imports to 5-year-old and younger used cars. Then there are some countries like New Zealand which require cars to comply with specific exhaust emissions requirements. Essentially, this rule has a very similar outcome to a pure age limit, since the emissions rules are generally imposed on a certain date.
Other countries, such as Australia, will allow importation of used vehicles on a list of permitted cars. In fact, in the case of Australia the import regulations are more nuanced than this, since older vehicles can be brought in much more freely, but more modern models have to be on the list.
The absolute safest way to insure you can bring in the used vehicles you want is to check for yourself with the relevant government departments in your country. Having done that, you may find out that vehicle exporters from Japan hand out lots of seemingly good advice about this, but at the end of the day you are the importer and you are right there and able to get hold of the most accurate information.
Now, the next thing you have to do is to insure that you can purchase the vehicles you would like at best prices. The easiest way to do so is to find an export company with access to car auctions in Japan and sign up for a free trial. See how many used cars of the model, mileage and level of quality (grade) you are looking for are coming up for auction each day. The greater the numbers, the better the chance that you are going to be able to get the cars you want at a nice price.
Of course, in order to be able to import cars from Japan, you will have to find a supplier that is able to buy them and arrange shipping for you. This is the final aspect of the groundwork that you need to do.
So what ought you to be searching for in a potential supplier? Well, first off, you should insure that they can provide you with online access to all the used car auctions in Japan. These used car auctions are the best places to buy cars, and it is no good if your car exporter partner does not have proper access to them.
The next thing you ought to do is to send every one of these potential exporter partners an email. A good question is to ask what the estimated FOB price would be for the car model, year, KM and quality level (grade) that you are looking atbuying.
There are a couple of things that you are testing here: Speed and accuracy. In other words, you are looking for a rapid response which gives you a clear, informative answer. The sad fact of the matter is that with many exporters, you will find that your email will either not be answered for days, or you will get a response in return that is not at all clear. It is obvious that if your potential partner in Japan cannot answer this initial correspondence both quickly and clearly, you can imagine how stressful it is going to be trying to deal with them remotely.
By this stage you will have pared down your group of prospective car exporter partners quite a bit. Now is the time to compare these companies’ terms of sale. Something else that will quickly narrow down the number of companies left on your list is to simply check if they have any kind of genuine contract terms at all. However much you detest legal documents, you can be sure that the exporter with just a few sentences on a web page is not going to be as professional or take as much care as the one with a proper contract document.
By this time, you will be down to just two or three possible partners at the very most. You now need to look closely into their terms of sale and think about which one is going to be the most optimum fit for you. But here is my final suggestion for you as you ponder this: You get what you pay for. Yes, I know, that seems obvious, but a few thousand Yen clawed back here or there will nowhere near compensate for poor service and poor vehicles.
To wrap things up, however enticing used cars from Japan may appear, you really ought to make sure you research import rules, prices and availability, as well as checking out suppliers before you take the plunge and actually get any cars.
Stephen Munday is co-owner of Integrity Exports, a Japanese car exporter that procures cars from car auctions in Japan for car importers worldwide. He has over a decade of experience of residing and working in Japan, in addition to a high level of fluency in the Japanese language.
This article is (c) Stephen Munday, 2011. Permission is only given to reproduce this article in full with the URLs correctly hyperlinked and with the authorship and copyright correctly attributed.
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