Quote:
Originally Posted by
Matt 
well in all honesty, so many people have done it before you that you may as well just buy what you want second hand there.
I mean, when I did it 12 yrs ago, there weren't a whole lot of FTOs in the country, and it was cheaper to bring one in yourself than to buy one there...so many people have done it since then that I probably wouldn't bother.
The only downside with it is that most of the people bringing them in are like 20 year old kids (I was one of them) who beat the shit out of the cars thinking that they're race car drivers (I was one of them). When you import yourself, chances are you have a low mileage car, well looked after by an anal retentive Japanese guy. When you buy second hand in country, you are buying it from some kid who knows that the fucker is overheating like mad and the head gasket is going to go any minute now, cos he spent the last six months drag racing in it.
OP - what are you thinking of buying?
I was reading up on this recently and I think I read that Australia is tightening up on grey market cars. You can do it all day in NZ and the UK, I think, as the poster above outlined.
We can import grey market cars (they usually come from the US or Japan) in my country and we pay a tax levy of about 30% of the car's value, and it's only really got to pass a sniffer test and some other stuff that most cars can usually pass. JDM RX-7's used to be popular here because their engines worked out to 1300cc, which is in a very low tax bracket, the same as like a Toyota Yaris or similar city car.
