>Hello John,
> Your Tracking info holds true for the UK, but most of
the first
>destinations in the USA may have been dealers, or importers
that forwarded
>the cars to dealers, or were Despatched to the main offices
for British
>Leyland in the USA (as from your book).
Glenn - I entirely agree with you in principle, though I
might have misled you as well. Cars delivered in the UK as
normal UK spec vehicles would not have their licence numbers
recorded at Heritage - unless there were exceptional
circumstances surrounding the initial delivery. However, the
post to which I responded said the very first owner had
taken delivery of the car in the UK. On the assumption that
the vehicle started out as US spec, the post suggested (to
me, anyway) that it had been supplied for use in England and
later export by the owner. This was a very common thing in
those days as it enabled the owner to import a US/Canada
spec vehicle into the States or Canada as being first
licenced outside the destination territory. Consequently it
came in as a *used* car and attracted substantially reduced
import duties.
All these cars were known as Personal Export or Export Home
Delivery and as they came straight from the factory, they
would have carried Coventry licence plates. When Heritage
checks an application for a Certificate, it always examines
the car's original 'tally' or line setting ticket - and then
compares that against the original sales invoice - both of
which are microfilmed. All PE/EHD vehicles had their licence
number shown on the invoice and this is always recorded on
the certificate.
Most of those dealers and main
>offices are long gone out of business. For example, my
Stag came into
>British Leyland Motor, Inc. in Jacksonville, Florida,
despatched June 5 1973
>according to the BMIHT certificate. It was first titled in
Colorado, but
>Jacksonville was the distribution point for Triumphs coming
west.
Quite a lot also went in through San Francisco as well.
So from
>Florida, loaded onto lorries and trucked across the USA to
the various
>dealerships. Some sat for more than a year before being
sold, or were
>shipped again to another B/L dealership in another state
for sale.
> It seems the best tracking for the US is to back track
from current to
>previous owners, which many have found leads to a dead end
(ouch). ;-(
I agree. The vast majority will have been direct shipments
with no title or owner history until first sold by a dealer.
However, as I have briefly described above, there were quite
a number of notable exceptions, to the tune of about 5000
vehicles a year that were supplied first of all in the UK to
visitors on vacation and UK based US forces personnel. In
both cases, the export of the car was the owners
responsibility.
Cheers
John
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