I like the 1950’s look of these cars-plus the high roofline is something I appreciate-why on earth do are car designers insist in swept back roof? (IT allows you to bump your head, if you ride in the back).
Anyway, can you buy these cars in the USA? What wpould you wind up paying (to have the emissions system certified)?
Not easily.
Scroll down to the US Section.
The emissions system is just the tip of the iceberg. Airbags; seat belts; height, size, & brightness of headlights; the list is endless.
I ran a Porsche hop-up shop in SoCal back in the early 80s. At that time, Southern California bought ~25% of all new Porsches sold worldwide. We looked at importing gray market cars and it was astonishing the laundry list of ways the Feds could say “no.”
Here is one trivial example we dealt with:
Just prior to that time the US regulations required that all rear turn signals be red. The German regulations required they be amber. So the factory made both colors of taillight lenses and mounted the correct color for cars destined for the US or for Germany.
If we brought a German car into the US we’d have had to replace the tail light lenses. That particular change would have been easy for us, since the red lenses were manufactured and readily available through the US dealer parts channels.
But imagine for a minute that Porsches weren’t normally imported to the US and the factory never made any red taillight lenses. How the heck would we be able to manufacture a tail light lens which looked & worked like a factory part but in a different color? Even setting aside the regulatory hassles to becoming certified to make legal auto parts, just the engineering required is way beyond a small shop’s skills.
And all that’s for something as stupid and trivial as a tail light lens.
Switching to your Hindustan, how about building a new brake system with the Fed’s required dual master cylinder when the Ambassador only has a single? Or retrofitting a safety glass windshield made in just the right shape and curve?
*Sometime around 1980 the Feds relented and allowed those evil Commie amber rear turn signals. For a year or so we did a brisk business in swapping out the red ones for ambers so guys’ cars could have more of that cool Euro look. Then Porsche began shipping all their new cars with ambers and it was suddenly not nearly so cool.
So … say I am in Germany, and I see this sitting there for sale, and I buy it to make traveling around for this gimp a lot easier and decide I really like it, can I bring it home?
If you ask the feds, no way. However, many states will just register whatever you wheel in-- for example around here we’ve been getting a lot of those Japanese mini-trucks which are imported in as off-road utility vehicles to get around customs but the state is more than happy to give you a set of plates for one.
A trick that springs to mind with the Hindustan is since the car is based on some sort of Morris from the 50’s, if you could find a rusted out hulk of an old Morris rotting away somewhere, you could import the Hindustan as “spare parts”. This is the trick that people use to get new aircooled Beetles up from Mexico-- you find a rusted out 60’s Beetle, import a 1990’s one from Mexico (usually with a Mexican accomplice who drives it over the border for a friendly visit), swap over a couple parts and register the 90’s VW as the 60’s one.
ETA: I am obviously not a lawyer, nor customs official and would just like to emphasize that there’s a good chance you’d get your car siezed or worse if you actually try this!
Yeah - back in the day before computerized emmissions chacks and the various DMVs’ computers talking to each other, there was a lot of room for shenanigans just outside (heck *well *outside) the law.
We once stapled together 3 wrecks and gave it a VIN from a fourth. We sold it with full disclosure & jumped through the hoops to register ol’ FrankenPorsche properly. But we were in the business and had a reputation to protect. I saw a lot of backyard “clip jobs” that had been resold on bad paper without any disclosure.
While I assume some still goes on today, I bet the scope for amateurs to play games just outside the system with little fear of getting caught is pretty well closed up.
Didn’t Bill Gates try and import a Porsche 959 and the Feds kept it for over a decade?
What LSLGuy and the grey import article seem to be talking about is importing for the purpose of selling the car onwards. What’s the situation for personal imports? It was no hassle at all for me to take my car and motorcycle (Chevy Lumina Z34 and HD Sportster) from the US to the UK in 1995. The restrictions I remember are that they had to be registered in my name in the US for at least 6 months prior to importing and I couldn’t sell them on for a year after importing them.
You could get a lot more Fahrzeugbeschreibung for your money if you tried.
As long as the cars leave with you when you leave, it’s mostly the same. In most developed countries, foreign nationals on temporary work visas or diplomatic staff are allowed to bring personal vehicles.
What most people don’t quite understand about importing foreign moon cars is that you are trying to do 2 things: 1) Import a car into the US. International trade is a federal jurisdiction and the import and export of cars or anything else is administered by Customs/Border Service. 2) Register and drive the car. Registration of motor vehicles and highway patrol is a state juristiction and administered by your local state authorities.
The 2 have nothing to do with each other. The Border service doesn’t care whether you register or drive the car, they only care about the act of bring it into the country. If you don’t follow the rules your car is crushed and you could go to federal pen. Your local DMV in turn is not concerned with international trade and doesn’t care where your car comes from, as long as you have a VIN and whatever other certificates (emissions, safety, etc) the state requires, you can get a plate and drive it.
Yep, everything you describe here is essentially fraud. The federal government doesn’t like it when you try to defraud them. You might as well go ahead and steal the car, too.
You’re probably right as I’ve described it, but there is also some genuine gray area. Like in the case of the VW, it’s perfectly legit to take an old one (which only has to adhere to 1960-something safety and emission standards, such as they were) and put on a modern engine from a new one. While you’re at it, you might as well throw on the better brakes, suspension, maybe that body that’s not all rusty (and has the funky modern interior) and the nice new floor pans and eventually you end up with nothing but the heater channels from the old car.
So where do you draw the line there? At what point does it transition from being a 60-something car to something new? It’s a fact of life that most air-cooled VW’s still running around these days are going to have a lot of new Mexican and Brazilian VW-spec parts. And what about someone’s old hot rod that has a drivetrain out of an '09 Corvette and is now mostly made out of carbon fiber?
Furthermore, if the state willingly participates by giving you plates for what is clearly a grey-market car, does that mean they’re participating in the fraud as well?
I looked into importing one into Australia a few years ago as a cheap runabout, but it just wasn’t going to be practical or possible without insane amounts of paperwork and hoop-jumping.
They are imported into the UK, though, but I don’t even want to think about what it would cost to get a Hindustan Ambassador imported to Australia from the UK and then brought up to spec… :eek:
If your VW was legitimately made in the 1960s, it would be importable under the 25 year exemption which allows you to bring in classic cars. Your original example was a 1990s model which was still produced in Mexico.
Your state has no laws on the importation of cars and no one at your DMV cares where your car came from. The FEDERAL government however isn’t very keen about you fraudulently importing cars from other countries into the United States.
What I was saying is the way VW afficianados used to get around this was basically by bringing in a 1990’s VW and dropping it onto a 60’s VW floorpan. So 95% of the car is a 1990’s Mexi-Beetle. Is this now a new car, or did they just replace a lot of parts on an old Beetle? If you think it is a new car, at what point do you draw the line?
Also depending on where you are the state administered smog program won’t be a walk in the park.
Just trying to get a smog cert for a Hindustan Ambassador in California gives me a head ache.
You are not allowed to “bring in a 1990s VW” or any other vehicle that hasn’t been officially certified by the DOT/EPA. There is no grey area.
You could legally import “Vehicle Parts”, which your 1990s VW could be turned into if you, say, cut it in half with a sawzall. This is actually a common practice around the world - there is a thriving market for vehicle “halfcuts”. You can do a search to see what I mean.
For a recent example, someone tried to bring in Japanese market Nissan Skylines by importing the body shells as car parts and then assembling them in the USA as kit cars, a practice that is blatantly illegal and spelled out in no uncertain terms. This fellow is an idiot and is now certainly out of business and probably in jail. All the cars that he brought in have been seized and crushed.
It looks like that practice is more to save on shipping cost though, not that there’s any particular change in the legal status of the car just by sawing it in half. According to this site: http://www.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/import/faq%20site/pages/page2.html#Anchor-13029
just removing the engine is enough to make the car an “assemblage of auto parts” instead of a motor vehicle. Even a dissasembled car counts as just a bunch of parts.
(Note that you can also import cars for display or racing or off-road use, so again, it is not an absolute fact that you cannot set foot in this country with a non-EPA/DOT compliant vehicle)
I agree that if you just pull the engine out to bamboozle customs and then plop it back in and drive the car around as-is that’s clearly illegal. However, there is absolutely nothing illegal about importing a car as a parts car, then putting 95% of those parts on a car (or remnants of a car) which is allowed to be in this country. It’s perhaps against the spirit of these laws, but not the letter.
So the OP could find an ancient Morris mouldering away somewhere, ship a Hindustan in with the engine taken out (sent ahead just to be safe), put the Hindustan body, drivetrain, suspension, brakes, etc on the Morris’s frame, and register it as a '56 Morris (or whatever the specifics may be).
Okay, so re-reading that link I posted it seems that even parts are supposed to meet applicable federal standards. In that case I dunno, but there are a lot of non-US specification parts that make it into the country (searching for the half-cut cars brought up whole companies who’s buisness was bringing in mangled Japanese-spec cars for parts). Either I’m not understanding the rules right, the rules are simply not enforced or these companies are massive criminal enterprises.
Either way, sounds like a huge grey area to me.
what you are describing is a Temporary Import Bond (TIB) I used to deal with cars on TIBs when Volvo would bring over a non-US spec car for us to do training on.
IIRC the bond was good for either 1 year or 2 and could renewed one time for one additional year. The bond was for the entire retail value of all the cars covered under the bond.
At no time during the period of the bond could these cars be put on the public highway.
At the end of the bond period, we had a choice. We could export the cars OR we could have them destroyed at a customs bonded destruction facility.
when I say destroyed, I mean destroyed. They had a jaws of life thing that broke all the wheels into pieces and tore the tires to shreds, another hydraulic jaw tore the engine into pieces. then they started on the body.
In 5 minutes there was nothing usable left.
Had we taken anything off the any of the cars, and customs caught us, the ENTIRE bond was forfeit. :eek:
to give you an idea of how serious TIBs are, Acura USA had in it’s possession the very first NSX ever built. they wanted to keep it for a museum. the car was on a TIB. customs said no, either crush it or send it back to Japan.
Japan did not want it and AUSA was in a quandary as they were trying to save a bit of their history.