Import guide
A three-year-old car often lands cheaper than the tax on a new one. The crossover point is not where most people expect.
Almost every charge on an imported car is a percentage of its value. That single fact decides whether you should be shopping new or used, and it pushes harder toward used than most buyers assume.
Customs duty is ten per cent of the customs value. Import VAT is twenty per cent of the value plus that duty. Our own fee is banded on the purchase price. All three fall as the car gets cheaper, and they fall together — which is why a car costing thirty per cent less does not land thirty per cent cheaper, it lands rather more than that.
Freight is a flat cost: a container costs what it costs whether there is a new Corvette inside it or a five-year-old pickup. Registration, single approval and §57a are fixed. On a cheap car those fixed costs are a large share of the total, which is the floor under how cheap an import can sensibly be.
NoVA is a percentage too, so it also falls with value — but the rate is set by CO₂, not by price. That has an unpleasant consequence for older performance cars: a fifteen-year-old V8 with no European CO₂ figure attracts the power-based substitute, and the rate can approach the cap on a car that is not worth very much at all. We have seen the tax exceed a third of the landed cost on exactly that profile.
So "older is cheaper" holds until the car is old enough to have no European figure behind it, and then it reverses sharply.
The sweet spot is usually a car two to four years old, in a model with European homologation, bought below the point where depreciation flattens out. New makes sense when the model is not sold here at all and you want a warranty and a known history. Very old rarely makes sense unless the car is the point — a collectable, where the tax is simply part of the cost of owning it.
Run both through the import calculator before you decide. The difference is usually larger than the difference between the two cars.
If your car has no European CO₂ figure, Austria invents one from engine power. What that costs, and what to do about it.
One is cheaper, one protects the paint. The decision depends on the car rather than the budget.
The import calculator runs the same engine we do, at today's ECB rate. Or tell us the car and we will establish the real basis in writing.
