Hi guys, i need some help
i’m thinking in buying a NA MX-5, but here in portugal prices are ridiculous and a few weeks back i read in the mongolian rally website that a foreigner can buy a car in britain with no residence, is this true? i want to buy it and drive it in portugal as my regular car with indefenite time, but i have no uk residence, so what do i have to do? and what about insurance? does it have to be british or can it be portuguese? and MOT and tax? how does that work? do i have to go there every year for MOT?
thanks in advance.
As far as I know, there is nothing stopping you buying a car in the UK, wherever you come from. The difficulty is getting it back to Portugal legally. Any issues in getting it registered etc over there are up to you, of course.
I think you would need a UK address to put on the V5, so that when it was returned to you in a week or two with your ownership details on, you could return it saying the car had been permanently exported. I don’t know a way of doing that without getting the V5 first.
To get the car from the purchase location in the UK to Portugal, it would need to be taxed and insured if you drove it on the road. You could do a month’s tax (the minimum) at a Post Office or by phone, but insurance would be more difficult, as you would find it hard to get UK insurance without a UK address. Even if you insured it in Portugal, this might not show up on the UK database and lead to you getting stopped by the Police before you leave the country. Driving without insurance is a fairly serious offence here. Of course, you would need to comply with the legalities in France and Spain as well, if you go the obvious route.
All in all, it might pay you to see if you could arrange a professional to transport it back home - someone to pick the car up in the UK and deliver it to Portugal, with no worries about tax and insurance for you. It might work out cheaper and less hassle in the long run.
Before you start, check if there are any restrictions in Portugal on importing a car in this way. My stepdaughter moved to Ireland where cars are much more expensive than the UK. They took their car with them, thinking it would be cheaper, but by the time they had paid various import duties and tariffs and fees, it would have been cheaper to buy one over there.
I’m no expert, these are just a few thoughts from a UK resident and multiple vehicle owner.
Some information here;
https://www.gov.uk/taking-vehicles-out-of-uk/for-12-months-or-more
Contact Andrew at autolink he might be able to help you. www.autolinkuk.co.uk
well, i’ve been seaching and it turns our dear goverment doesn’t know the concept of european union and makes it ilegal for citizens to drive foreigner veichles… most likely to force us to buy stupid expensive cars with about 50% tax of it’s value (tax over veichles and VAT) wish makes a double tributation (ilegal in EU) so it makes used cars also expensive…
looks like i’m going have to buy one here for 6000€ instead of 1000-1500 over there… what a shame… for this price i might as well buy a MR2 SW20… or none… i’m a bloody student…
but hey, thanks for the answers
The big snag is that you want an NA to keep costs down.
Pre 1999 cars don’t have a Certificate of European Conformity which you MUST have to register a car in the EU now. Does this apply to Portugal?? check this out.
This may mean you have to go for a NB 2000+ car. If so I have some experiences to pass on.
The Frog
I live in France and last year bought an MX5 in the UK to bring back to France and get it registered here. There are two distinct issues here. Firstly before buying one. As has been said already, make sure you can get it registered in Portugal. Registration requirements and procedures vary from country to country across the EU so what I did in France will probably not apply in Portugal.
Firstly buying the MX5.
1. You need to find out what certification and paperwork the registration authorities in Portugal will need for the car in order to
register it.
2. Find out if they will register a “grey” import i.e. a Japanese model brought into the UK such as a Eunos. It is virually impossible to
register them here in France but may be possible to do so in Portugal. It can be done in some other EU countries.
3. You may be able to register a UK car in Portugal even if it doesn’t have a European Certificate of Conformity. My car did not have
one, but Mazda France were able to issue their own declaration that was acceptable to the French registration authorities. Check with
Mazda in Portugal to see if they can help.
4. Certificates of Conformity were only made avaiable for MX5s during late 1998. So if you need to get a CoC contact Mazda UK with the
Registration Number and VIN number and they will be able to tell you if one is available. I have to say they were not very efficient
and were slow to respond to enquiries and I lost the purchase of two cars due to this. Make sure you get confirmation if you need to
get a CoC before paying for any car you want to buy.
Getting it back to Portugal.
Due to recent changes in UK regulations, any car you buy will need to have valid UK road tax, insurance and MoT for you to drive it on UK
roads. As you are not resident in the UK and do not have a UK address you will not be able to take out UK insurance or get the car road
taxed either. You may be able to arrange insurance in Portugal that will cover you driving back but this will not enable you to tax the
car in the UK and you run the risk of getting stopped by the police and possibly getting fined oe even getting the car impounded. I got
round this by persuading the previous owner of the car to wait a couple of days before informing the UK licencing authorities that he had
sold the car. This gave me enough time to get it out of the country before the risk of being stopped by the police. This is not strictly
legal though and the previous owner may not be willing to do this for you. The UK licencing authorities told me that the only way for me
to get the car out of the country was to put it on a trailer. Another way would be to get the owner of the car to drive it one of the
channel ports and pick it up there and get it straight onto a ferry. There is supposed to be an EU wide provision that allows you to
drive an untaxed vehicle in order to export it and somewhere I have to paperwork for this. However, I haven’t heard of anyone trying to
use it or showing it to a traffic cop who has just pulled you over for having no road tax.
Having got he car across the channel I can’t advise you on complying with different countries regulations as you make your way back to
Portugal. It may well be that as long as you have valid insurance you could well be OK.
I hope this helps. I took me quite a long time to get everything organised but was well worth the trouble. MX5s like mine typically
cost 2 to 3 times a much here in France as I paid for it in the UK. The only way you could keep the UK registration would be to have a UK address to enable you to tax and insure it every year plus the car would have to go back to the UK to have a new MoT each year as well. Not sure what the road tax would be but I think mine would have cost about £180 (about 230 Euros) a year. This is a very expensive way of doing it and may well be illegal in Portugal. It certainly is here in France. If you need any more info. feel free to contact me.
I’m not sure where the certificat of conformite and 1998/9 come from. I bought my MX na in the UK 4 years ago and immediately registered it in France. Mazda France were happy to issue a certificat (for €130) and it was first registered in the UK in april 1995. So the point about CoC only after 1998/9 is very clearly wrong. The French document that I obtained very clearly stated that it was a CoC and for a vehicle registered in 95. To buy the car, you don’t need a UK address, you just fill in the registration document saying that it’s being exported (though the other points above about road tax are correct).
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this incorrect information on a website. I don’t know if it’s the same in Portugal, but in France a French language CoC was a must, therefore if you need one in Portugese then perhaps check with Mazda Portugal for what they’ll issue a CoC for and how much they’ll charge you. Getting an English CoC would have meant paying an official translator to translate it in France and it may well be the same for you.
Even in France it is possible to register Japanese import Mx5’s BUT it is a complete pain (a colleague’s brother did it).
For what worth, France doesn’t levy VAT on cars imported if their more than a certain age - it may be worth checking on for Portugal if the government licencing agency has a website. You need to get a conrol technique here to register it (they don’t care if it has an MOT), but again that may be different in Portugal.
The information I’ve given is not incorrect.
European CoCs from Mazda UK are not available for MX5s earlier than 1998. I contacted Mazda France who anknowledged this and said that they could issue an “attestation of identification” that although not a CoC as such, was sufficient to enable me to register my 1995 car in France. I’ve registered several UK vehicles in France and all prior to the MX5 were successfully done without any problems using English language CoCs issued in the UK. I did point out that living in Portugal may require completely different paperwork which will need thorough investigation before going any further.
You are right in saying that registering “grey” imports in France can be done but is getting increasingly difficult and expensive and the general advice is not to bother. I know several people who’ve tried and given up due to the prolonged time and the expense of changing many vehicle parts to comply with French regulations, which are often totally absurd. An example being a friend trying to register a Yamaha motorcycle which was blocked because it didn’t have the exact OEM tyres from when the bike was new and these particular tyres were no longer made, and the examiner would not accept newer replacements even in the identical sizes. There are often “grey” MX5s for sale in France that people have bought, sometimes in other European countries, that they’ve brought to France and then realise that getting them registered is a nightmare, and then give up and want to sell the car.
You can now use a UK MoT certificate to register a UK car here in France as long as the MoT is less than six months old. This really is the same as when applying for a new registration (carte gris) here, where the C.T. (French MoT) must be less than six months old.
Thanks Hookie and Trunnie for setting me straight and clarifyong other issues. Apologies, when I did mine it was the “Attestation” from Mazda France ,oops.
Did not know about using UK MOT when applying for Carte Gris, where did that come from?
The VAT thing I think is about the free circulation of things, so getting clearance from the local VAT/TVA office is essential (and in France one cannot get registered without that document).
So all the best to snitram down in Portugal we do hope you get the car and have a great time driving it in Portugal.
Frog
Using a UK MoT if less than 6 months old is a relatively new facility. However, it seems that some French registration offices (Prefectures) will accept it and some just refuse to. Typical French! There have been quite a lot of changes in the last couple of years in many areas to try and standardise regulations and paperwork across the EU. Sometimes it works and sometime it clearly doesn’t! It looks as though at long last visitors from one EU country caught speeding on cameras will soon have fines following them back to their own countries. This has been on the cards for years but it looks like it will be finally implimented. Can’t remember how many French speed camers I’ve been flashed by over the years on UK registered bikes! It is now supposed to be a legal requirement for official and legal documents to be valid in any language now i.e. you no longer have to translate these documents from one language to another if taken from one country to another within the EU. Hence the use of English CoCs in France for importing UK vehicles.