The Very Imp Checklist You Really Should Carry Out Before You Procure Any Secondhand Cars from Japan

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If you have read this far, then you must be at least a little bit interested in buying used vehicles from Japan. After all, these cars with their lower mileage, high levels of quality and competitive pricing make them an interesting option. But, as I mentioned earlier, there are several things you have to make sure you do first:

Before you take one more step, you must make sure that you can really import used cars from Japan. There are a small number of nations that proscribe imports of used vehicles completely, but there are often legal barriers you have to jump.

There are sometimes restrictions on the age of the car. A couple of examples of countries that do this would be Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that restrict imports to used vehicles that are not older than 5 years. On the other hand there are countries like New Zealand that require cars to comply with specific tail pipe emissions restrictions. In essence, this rule has a very similar outcome to a pure age limit, since the emissions rules are usually imposed on a particular date.

Elsewhere, other countries, such as Australia, permit imports of used cars from a list of approved cars. Actually, in the case of Australia the import rules are more complex than this, as older vehicles can be brought in freely, but more modern models have to be on the list.

By far the best method to make sure you will be able to bring in the used cars you would like is to check for yourself with the relevant government departments in your country. Having done that, you may find that vehicle exporters from Japan give you lots of seemingly good advice about your country’s import rules, but at the end of the day you are the person who will be bringing these cars in and you are on the ground and able to get the most up to date information.

The next thing you have to do is to make sure that you can buy the vehicles you want at the prices you want. The best way to do this is to find an export company with access to car auctions in Japan and sign up for a free trial. Check out just how many cars of the model, mileage and level of quality (grade) you think you would like are coming under the gavel each day. The greater the numbers, the better chance you will be able to get the cars you want at a nice price.

Obviously, in order to be able to procure cars from Japan, you will have to find a supplier who is able to buy them and ship them for you. This is the final aspect of the groundwork that you need to do.

So what ought you to be after in a potential supplier? Well, firstly, you need to be sure that they can provide you with online access to the large number of used vehicle auctions in Japan. These auctions are the ideal places to source cars, and it is not acceptable if your supplier does not have the right access to them.

Secondly to do is to send each of these prospects an email. One question to ask is what the predicted FOB cost should be for the car model, age, mileage and condition (grade) that you are interested inbuying.

There are two issues that you are going to test by sending this email: How fast they are, and how accurate they are. What I mean is, you are wanting a quick reply that then gives you a clear, in-depth answer. The unfortunately thing is that with the majority of car exporters from Japan, you will discover that your message will either go unanswered for a number of days, or you will received a response back which is not very clear. It is clear that if the potential supplier is not able to answer this first correspondence both quickly and in a clear way, you can easily predict how frustrating things will be when you attempt to deal with them remotely.

By now you should have have whittled down your list of potential partners quite a lot. What you need to do now is to compare their terms of business. Another trick that will rapidly reduce the numbers is to simply see whether they have any sort of genuine terms of business at all. However much you may dislike legal documents, you can be certain that the outfit with just a few sentences on a web page will not be as professional or careful as the one who has a proper contract document.

By this this stage, you will most likely be down to just two or three potential car exporters at the very most. You now really ought to look closely into their contractual terms and think about which one is going to be the best for you. But here is my final nugget of wisdom for you as you ponder this: You get what you pay for. Yes, I know, that seems obvious, but a few 1,000 Yen saved here or there will nowhere near compensate for poor service and poor vehicles.

To sum everything up here, however enticing used cars from Japan may seem, you have to make sure you research import rules, prices and availability, as well as suppliers before you launch out and buy any cars.

The author of this article co-owns Integrity Exports, a Japanese used car exporterthat gets vehicles from car auctions in Japan for car importers around the world. He has over a decade of experience of residing and working in Japan, as well as a high level of fluency in Japanese.

This article is Copyright 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.