Archive for November, 2009
Business Vehicles At Auction
In the UK you have to treat business vehicles different to say privately owned ones as often they are liable to VAT charges. When we say business vehicles we don’t mean vans or lorries such like but normal cars that have been used for the purpose of benefiting a business. An example is a small Citroen car that came to auction that used to belong to a driving instructor training school and had a bump (not a good advert). Normally this car would be the value of the fianl hammer, but because this was business owned for no private use and the owner of the business claimed VAT off the purchase, the car went to auction as final price plus VAT, even though it was salvage. Not sure how this works in other countries but it is very important to cover your tracks here.
This could be especially important when buying a car that even though damaged is not registered as a salvage car. Sometimes this is because the company underwrote any insurance claims up to a certain point and it is the vehicle owner who is selling the car, not the insurance company.
This ex driving instructor training school vehicle had only done 20,000 miles but cost the new owner 15% more thyan he bargained, as he was not prepared and did not do his homework.
USA Export Salvage
Much of the salvage that goes though the USA auto salvage auction system cannot be given a new title so therefore either finds itself scrapped for auto parts or sold to other countries where it has its own way of testing cars and often shows no history except that the car was previously regitered abroad.
There is a good and bad sode to this type of business , exporting salvage. The good side is that some makes and models are much more expensive outside of the USA, which means they do become cost effective to repair, where in the USA they could be deemed as non repairable. Certain German models for instance can be cost effective to export from teh USA repair to a good standard pass the local roadworthiness test and everything be good business. This is also applicable to the breaker market also, as the parts on these cars can also be worth a lot more in other countries.
The bad side of this business is where non roadworthy cars are exported ot countries who do not have the safetry standards in place they do in the USA or say the UK. Certain countries could export a a salvage car from the States which is just unsafe and non roadworthy and bodge up the based stuff and then take a dangerous car on the road.
A new company that is deciding to help foriegners buy salvage cars from the states is Salvagesparefinder that also does UK salvage. They now have become a broker for Coparts and let people buy usa salvage without any dealers licence