Buying a car in the US and bringing it to EU
 

Has anyone had any experience with buying a car say on Ebay and bringing it to the EU? What are the options? Obviously not by air mail.

I'm curious on how much can that cost. A hummer h2 here costs 40k Eur, and I can get one on Ebay for $30k

The biggest bitch is the import tax. No expericince with Europe but looked into South America. If your country has a quota on imported cars and you are on the wrong side of that, it is brutal.

I knew a guy that was importing Santa Fe's from the US and selling them. It was a profitable business, but he probably had couple of tricks.

Bump for more info on this. :)

Unless you are using the Hummer for marketing or off-roading, forget it. It is a gas pig.

Ever occur to you he might wanna resell it? :winkwink:

How much of a gas pig?

And yeah, I'd pretty much pimp it out, show off to my friends and resell it.

So what if it's a gas hog? If the man wants to use his money on gas, then cool. To each his own.

20l+/100Km

50$/TON for the freight fee,have no idea with the god damn tax.

depends where in the EU, The Netherlands has got horrendous tax on cars, but somewhere like Spain or Poland probably hasn't

Shipping should be around $1500 per container (I think you can fit one big car or maybe two really small cars into a shipping container), it takes them 1-2months to deliver.
For taxes in your country - check yourself, often you have to do a test and get the engine approved as euro3/euro4 (eco-friendly, although most newer US cars meet even higher standards) and there are other things such as headlights (in US most cars have equal lights, while in Europe drivers side covers a bit shorter area, to avoid blinding drivers from opposite direction), turning signals usually have to be orange while in US they're often red etc.. So you're likely to have some additional, not predicted costs.
It's not worth importing cheap cars such as neons etc (unless you get a bulk deal somehow), I think the largest difference we've found was on infiniti FX45's (in europe often above 45k eur, in US ~$35k, and the USD/EUR difference isn't small either :)

Meh, not that much. My pimped out Tucson eats 16+l/100km

I don't think that's much of a problem here, the biggest thing that worries me is Tax on registering the car here. It can take you up to 20% of the cars cost here I think.

I believe you would have to pay VAT at 17.5% and Customs Duty if you import in the UK.

Look at my situation - our domestic piece of junk is Yugo, our government is protecting the factory by setting a 20% customs fee plus 18% tax on top of that, so for all cars, used or new, you get a total of about 40% on top of the new/used car price in catalogue.. This is to prevent people from buying cheap fiats, citroens etc (small cars) by blowing up their price in start.
For example - I've recently sold my '96 Audi A4 for ~7500eur here, and in Germany they cost around 3000.. You cannot import them because they allow Euro3 cars only (above '99-2000) and those are still pricy.