Importing a car from the UK can save you money
Has it had time to register? It's simple - you don't
over tax yourself if you are buying a new vehicle and considering
importing.
Importing a car from the UK to Italy was not a decision we
took lightly. For starters, importing a car meant that we had a long
drive to take our old one back and go and collect a new one with all the
critical timing that normally associates with such an endeavour.
Secondly, we had no way of trying out the new vehicle in advance since
the models here are different and, even though this vehicle is built to
register and drive on the Italian road network, its like does not
exactly exist anywhere here.
We had to get rid of our old vehicle - mainly because it was right-hand
drive and, as a result, could not be put forward for the Italian
equivalent of the MOT and thus not get insurance or be road-legal.
Ultimately that was the driving force behind importing a car but we also
discovered that we could save a lot of money too.
New cars are very expensive here and the one we were looking at was
going to cost us around €60,000. We could buy the same make and an
equivalent model in the UK for £24,000 (about €35,000 as it was then).
The £24,000 excluded British VAT (17.5%) but we would need to pay
Italian IVA at 20%. Add to that a 1,000 mile trip (diesel and wear and
tear) plus tolls and overnight stops and I reckoned the total cost of
importing a car would be in the order of €44,000 plus tax and plates -
still a lot less money.
We filled in the UK paperwork that declared we were importing a car from
the UK and drove it back to Italy without problem. All we had to do now
was to register the car and buy a set of Italian number plates.
During conversations with people here, we found out that being disabled
meant that if I was importing a car I didn't need to pay the full 20%
IVA on my vehicle as long as my doctor said I would have mobility
problems without it (true). We hastily applied for this status and,
after a few trials and tribulations along the way, we were awarded a
'104' Certificate which the Tax Office here will recognise.
We haven't got the number plates yet nor have we had time to register
the vehicle but it should be a formality. We paid the IVA today and that
was around €1400 bringing the total cost of importing a car to around
€39,000. This puts us in the strange position of having a car which is
potentially worth more second-hand than we paid for it new!
We hope our experience has given you confidence to consider importing a
car.
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