Scott Suhring wrote:
(as I recall from John, a way the Brits
collected some money was to register all cars even if they were
built for overseas shipping, thus assuring they collected their
registration tax).
Sorry, Scott - you've got it a bit back to front here. Cars weren't
shipped with UK plates so the Brits could collect road fund licence
duty. This was a legitimate dodge brought about by many overseas
customs authorities. If a car was imported with foreign licence
plates, it was deemed as 'used' on arrival in the destination market
and attracted a lower rate of duty at the port of entry. The only way
this could happen was for the car to be ordered annd paid for in the
UK by the end user or ordered and paid for in the overseas market 'for
collection in the UK' or 'to confirm shipment in the UK.' This meant
the ultimate owner had to be physically present in the UK to either
use the car or authorise it to be shipped direct from the factory. In
either case, the car bore UK license plates and in te case of a
'direct shipper' one used vehicle might arrive in the US as 'used'
with probably no more than three miles on the speedo head. The exact
same thing happened to French, German and Italian cars and the net
result was the US Customs Service legitimately defrauded the US
government of probably many millions of revenue dollars.
All in all, it was an excellent scam which took many politicians many
years to realise what was being thrown away - and even more years to
stop it happening. In the meantime, both customer and manufacturer
were more than happy to buy/sell tens of thousands of cars this way -
and I did pretty well out of it too!
As an example, Volkswagen at Stuttgart refined this to such a degree,
they even had on-site hotels at the factory and buses ferrying in
people from all over Germany to take delivery of tax free Beetles!
Jonmac
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