I Wanna Buy A Japanese Track Weapon..websites?

[dannyb]

Im not to sure about the awd my bros the one to talk to about swifts. I think his an idiot for selling it but he's just started his p plates again so he can't tow it any more and has had enough of depending on friends and family to be his towcar, so he wants it gone to buy a go-kart..

If your after a cheap race car give him a call....

[adamskill]

yeah the swift does come in awd, i had one, they call them suzuki 'cultus'. great little car. it would chop almost any car up to about 120km

[chevelle]

sorry people as i do drift racing the swift would prob not be such a good idea'

has the iron chef ever imported through tradecarview?

[Iron Chef]

As a general rule, I don't touch tradecarview with a barge pole

[Kaido_RR]

Budget?

Hey,

Can you send us a pm on what is around track spec GTR? price wise in japan?

trying to work out the price of a track car in japan but so far only been using yahoo auction and there isn't much choice atm

[Iron Chef]

Shoot me an email - [email protected]

[chevelle]

why is tradecarview so bad? sorry.. im really curious.

[Consequence]

Seeing you no longer need the 33 as a daily why not turn it into a track car?

[Birds]

Yer turn R33 into track car or buy a 90's RX7...

[Iron Chef]

why is tradecarview so bad? sorry.. im really curious.

I shouldn't get in trouble for this seeing it has already been published, but it's a column from HPI...

So you’ve had a look around locally for your next car and haven’t seen anything that catches your eye. You then make the decision to see what’s floating around in Japan, and jump on the computer to check some websites and see what is currently available. The first thing you’ll discover is that if you type something like “car import Japan” into Google, you’ll end up with eleventy billion sites all prepared to take your money in exchange for possibly sending you a vehicle.

The most popular site people seem to stumble across is Trade Carview (www.tradecarview.co.jp), where export agents across Japan will list their “stock” and generate new leads. The second is Goo (www.goo-net.com/english) which is a Japanese version of our CarSales but without any private sales, particularly handy because it has an English version of the site. In third comes Yahoo Japan Auctions (www.auctions.yahoo.co.jp), where an increasing number of private owners in Japan go to list cars that are hotly sought after by local and overseas buyers.

Anyone who has been to Las Vegas will know that the main casino strip that you see on TV shows is awesome to experience, but if you take a wrong turn down a side road, you quickly end up in some very dark and dodgy spots. Trade Carview is the Las Vegas of the importing world: searching through the cars is lots of fun at a superficial level, because you’re almost guaranteed to find the car of your dreams. Once you go down the side road and start contacting the export agents for more information, you should brace yourself for heartache and pain.

Firstly, my guesstimate is that around two thirds of the cars listed on there have already been sold; they’re what’s known in the trade as ‘dummy stock’. Car dealers in Australia like to do it a bit, but it’s an art form in Japan - list a hot car at a really cheap price, generate a heap of new leads, then tell every interested buyer “sorry that car has already been sold, but we can find you another one at auction if you like”. The less scrupulous Japanese export agents will only tell you this after you’ve sent your money over for the car, meaning you are then locked in to purchasing a car through them.

Then there are the agents who list cars with the auction house photos of cars they don’t even own. It’s a variation on the dummy stock technique: advertise cars that are coming up at auction in a few days’ time at a price that would give the agent a good chance of purchasing it, and then when people inquire about the car and put their money down, go and try and buy it at auction for the advertised price. If the agent purchases the car for less, they get a fatter margin, and if bidding goes past what they can afford to pay, tell the overseas buyer that the car is already sold and keep their money until an alternate car is found, guaranteeing them a sale either way.

Of the few legitimate cars remaining, completing a successful transaction depends entirely on the honesty of the export agent in Japan. I never cease to be amazed by the number of people willing to transfer thousands of dollars overseas to companies they’ve never heard of or dealt with before. Internet forums around Australia are littered with disastrous tales: cars that aren’t eligible for import into Australia getting refused entry at the docks, cars turning up that aren’t the ones in the photos on the website, cars with major structural damage getting rejected when they get to compliance, and the worst of all, cars just simply never being sent.

In the case of Goo, the cars listed all belong to dealers, and Japanese car dealers are very different to Australia. For starters, they like making big profits on their cars and treat haggling and low-balling as an insult, so forget negotiation. On top of this, I’ve had car dealers flatly refuse to sell cars to overseas buyers. Discrimination? Not quite. If the car has no rego left, it must go back through the roadworthy process before it can be re-registered, so dealers will often sell unregistered cars cheaply and then hit their local customers up for the registration work (which can reap them up to an extra two thousand dollars). An overseas sale often means no profits.

But, assuming the dealer is happy to sell to you and you agree on price, you are then relying on a car salesman (and they are virtually all men, sorry girls) to give you an accurate description of his own stock. Think about it logically – if you had to make a sales target for the month and knew that your prospective buyer was overseas and had no recourse against you if anything went wrong, wouldn’t you be tempted to describe your cars as being in much better condition than they really are? If you wouldn’t trust a local car salesman to describe his own cars accurately, don’t trust an overseas one either!

Yahoo Japan auctions are great if you’re looking for a track car (assuming all the goodies listed in the ad actually make the trip here along with the rest of the car), but for a car that’s going to be road-registered, you’re again at the mercy of a seller who is keen to sell and generally has no idea about the standard of car needed to pass compliance in Australia. Unless you pay a third party to inspect the car in Japan, you’re again taking a big risk. The other problem with Yahoo cars is that they’re invariably in remote locations and cost hideous amounts of money to transport to the docks.

For the reasons listed above, I stick to buying cars through export agents I trust from the dealer-only car auctions in Japan. A good export agent will act in the best interests of the buyer, not the seller, and if a car is rubbish, my agents will tell me it is and we’ll walk away from it. I’ve seen my agents cop losses in the thousands of dollars rather than knowingly send cars with mechanical problems to Australia, even though they could theoretically get away with it. It’s the reason I’ve remained loyal to them for the last 10 years, despite plenty of offers from other agents to try and get my business.

You probably saw this last suggestion coming, given I’m an import broker myself, but good brokers really are worth their weight in gold. They can’t totally eliminate the risks of importing, but they can drastically reduce them compared to importing yourself. So go out, have fun and enjoy the sights of Las Vegas, but if you decide to venture down a dark side street with a wad of cash, it’s best to have an experienced tour guide alongside you with a big spot light and a bigger shotgun.