In Ireland, we always seem to have had more of an affinity for Japanese cars than our European neighbours. Wind back to the 1970s, and while many European car buyers were giggling into their hands at the very thought of buying a Datsun or Toyota, we were lapping them up, pleased at long last to have a car which would start first time on a cold morning, and which even came with a radio.
Ireland was also the first country outside of Japan where Toyota became the bestselling car brand. That was in the late 1980s, and it seems nothing has changed as Toyota looks set to finish 2024 as the bestselling car brand in Ireland.
However, when it comes to Japanese cars, there has been a seismic shift in the past 12 months – we’re importing huge numbers of cars from Japan.
That seems like ... not news. After all, there has long since been a steady trickle of imported Japanese cars being brought into Ireland, as anyone who’s driving around in a car with a square rear number plate can attest. However, in the past year, things have changed out of all proportion. Back in 2014, slightly more than 2,000 Japanese cars were imported. In 2023 that number was 10 times higher – 23,000 – and it’s likely to be higher again in 2024.
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What’s causing this sudden gold rush for Japanese cars? It’s a one-word answer: Brexit. The importing of used cars from the UK spiked in the years immediately following the vote in favour of the UK leaving the EU in 2016. The value of sterling plummeted, making used UK cars suddenly much better value, and the fact that the process of extracting the UK from the EU took so long meant that those sales stayed buoyant for some time.
Right up to 2021, as it happens, when the final, official political deal was done, and the shutters came crashing down on UK imports, thanks to the imposition of VAT on used cars (previously, VAT had only been payable on cars less than six months old) and import duties.
However, Ireland still needs a flow of imported used cars – new car sales rarely break through the 120,000 barrier, and used transactions every year are usually three times that level, so we have turned to one of the few other right-hand drive markets in the world.
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The odd thing is that very few of the cars being imported from Japan are made by Japanese car companies.
Paul O’Connor runs an eponymous car sales company in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, and he’s been successfully importing cars from Japan for eager Irish customers. “The main reason we have to go to Japan is because the Irish car market is crying out for clean, low-mileage sub €20-25,000 cars. At the moment, that kind of car is very hard to find on an original Irish registration.”
Japanese cars fit the bill for several reasons, and not just because Japan drives on the left, just as we do. There’s a cultural benefit too, and that comes from the fact that Japanese culture is so very different from ours. For a start, Japanese car buyers change their cars much more frequently, leading to a glut of low-mileage cars passing through Japanese auctions and dealerships. Second, Japanese drivers look after their cars.
“There’s not much of a car maintenance culture in Ireland,” says O’Connor. “So cars of that sort of price in Ireland are often high-mileage cars and maintained to quite a poor standard. There’s just such a culture of respect in Japan, for cars and for everything else. They look after their cars like they would their house or even their cities. The cars that come in from Japan need very, very little work doing to them, whereas an eight-year-old Irish car? Oh my god!”
Those thinking that O’Connor is importing hordes of Toyotas, Nissans, and Hondas – the sort of vaguely exotic cars that look almost, but not quite, the same as the ones we are usually sold here – would be wrong. “I’d say 70-80 per cent of the cars that I import are from the big German brands,” says O’Connor. “It sounds mad, making a car in Germany, shipping it to Japan and then importing it into Ireland. But it’s true, we bring in a lot of VW Golfs, a lot of Audi A3s, and the Mercedes A-Class is going well for us too.”
O’Connor says that Japanese-brand cars are also in the mix, including the likes of the Toyota Corolla and Auris, Suzuki Swift and so on. Smaller hatchback models are what play well, it would seem, and O’Connor confirms that larger luxury models just don’t make financial sense as imports.
But how can imports from Japan, a country notably not part of the EU either, make more sense than just bringing them across from the UK, even with VAT and import duties? It’s simple, says O’Connor. Used prices in Japan are just so much cheaper. “You’ll actually pay more in tax than you will on the cost price of the car. So sometimes I pay maybe €5,000 for a car, but then we’ll pay €7,000 in taxes on top of that, and shipping is another €1,500 or so on top. I’d say the cost of the actual car is about 40 per cent of the final price.”
While it’s mildly shocking to once again have it pointed out just how badly Irish consumers are generally ripped off when it comes to motoring, it also raises an important point – unlike buying a car from the UK, bringing one in from Japan is not a task for the casual car buyer. There’s a lot of paperwork and huge cultural and language barriers to leap.
“Going into one of the auctions in Japan is completely overwhelming,” says O’Connor. “There are multiple auctions that could be going on all at once. I was at one auction where 16 cars were being auctioned off all at the same time, on separate screens. Thankfully, we work with some very good people in Japan who do this legwork for us, and I wouldn’t try to take it on myself. I simply wouldn’t have known what to do, nor what was expected of me.
“But while it’s overwhelming, it’s also incredibly well organised. And there’s another thing – if the system was reversed, if you were in Japan and trying to buy a car from an auction in Ireland, it would be a disaster, because the car just wouldn’t be described properly, it wouldn’t be in the correct condition. But the way they do business in Japan is incredibly correct and I’d even say honourable. Everything is how it is described. Not that occasionally things don’t go amiss, but the company that we deal with, seeing how they go about their business, how they’ve treated us, gives me a lot of faith.”
Parts – historically an issue for those importing cars from Japan – are not an issue, says O’Connor, as long as you avoid models that aren’t sold in Ireland or Europe. Stereos and sat-navs these days take mere minutes to convert. The only downside appears to be that some Irish insurers are still wary of Japanese imports, and will require an NCT before the car can be insured.
Will this tide of cars from the Pacific Rim continue? “I’ve kind of stopped making long-term predictions,” says O’Connor. “What the government is going to bring in, what the macroeconomic factors are like, that could all change. But in the medium term, say two to three years out, I can see demand continuing, against the void of good cars in the market. We’re going to import more next year than we did this year. The customers want it.”
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