Buying and Exporting European and American Luxury Cars from Japanese Used Car Auctions

Executive Summary about Subaru Second Hand  by Keith Taynton

Japanese auto makers such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Subaru are known world wide for producing high quality, efficient and durable cars. Car auctions in Japan give you the chance to buy and export a used Japanese brand car to your country, usually with big savings on similar priced cars you can find in your local dealership.

It’s possible to find these luxury cars very cheaply at Japanese car auctions and you can certainly make a very good saving on buying and exporting from Japan.

Your first step to finding a cheap luxury car is to find a reputable dealer. First, check out the dealers website and see if they have full contact and bank information and are members of the JUMVEA which is the Japanese government sanctioned trade body for foreign car exporters. Once you have contacted several dealers and filtered some out you can start to browse seriously for a car.

Auction and exporting process

All the major car auctions are online and dealers have access to national daily auctions giving a choice of upto 40,000 cars a day!

Once you have won a car then you also have to consider paying for paperwork fees, transportation, shipping, insurance and customs import taxes when the car arrives in your country.

Local auto regulation compliance

Japanese used car auctions are a great source of both Japanese and European/America brand quality used cars.

Japanese and American Automobile Markets Trends - An Insight Why American Companies Losing

Executive Summary about Subaru Second Hand  by Boris Mann

The automobile industry like any other industry is dependent on consumers. American cars have always made a statement, they are symbolic of what America and its people represent. They are big, shiny and beautiful. In the 20th century, it seems that the big car companies controlled the country and moved mountains, not anymore.

Japanese Car Market

Having disdained re-entering the Japanese market on the grounds that it would never be significant enough to warrant serious effort, the American companies relied on their enormous domestic market and focused international efforts on building a major position in Europe.

Wintroduction of the first American right-hand drive vehicles in 1994, hopes soared as sales of U.S. cars, Big Three autos companies nearly tripled over the next three years.

Key Factors influencing American Car Companies in the Japanese Car Market:

• Ford Japan has made by far the biggest commitment and investment among the Big Three faces the most severe challenge because of strategic and product shortcomings. Chrysler also faces serious questions about future product suitability in a fast-changing sport utility market.
• General Motors continues to play out a conservative and largely uninspired strategy that, if left alone, could drop it into third place behind Chrysler in unit sales of U.S. made vehicles in Japan. The current import share of the Japanese auto market is 9.6%, not the lower 5.4% reported by the Big Three and the U.S. government. Their calculation divides total import car sales, including grey market imports, by the total number of vehicles sold in Japan, including mini-vehicles, trucks and buses, which the American manufacturers do not even make for Japan. The rest of the world calculates market share simply and cleanly: by dividing imported passenger cars sold by the total number of passenger cars sold.

The South Korean brands have become competitive enough to pinch Japanese and domestic automakers. Isuzu presents a classic example of what can happen to an automaker that fails to invest in its market. The base Ascender lists for $26,644, about $300 less than the Chevrolet TrailBlazer built on the same production line, reports Edmunds.com, a car buyer research website. But buyers are finding TrailBlazer cheaper because of sales incentives.

Instead of three years or 36,000 miles, Isuzu’s warranty is 50,000 miles. GM’s involvement with Isuzu is not coincidental. For years, Isuzu thrived.

Isuzu followed up with the smaller Rodeo and a little sport vehicle, the Amigo.

Isuzu was a brash competitor. Then, little by little, the market withered away. The company restructured two years ago.

Quality Perception

A perception of poor quality certainly isn’t the only reason Ford and GM cars can have trouble in today’s market. That survey measures the number of problems vehicle owners have after 3 years of ownership.

The bad experiences of customers with American cars still lingers in their memories.

Reliability by the numbers

If you believe J.D. Power’s surveys, the story for American luxury brands Lincoln, Cadillac and Buick is particularly striking. Lincoln, Cadillac and Buick all out-scored Toyota’s Toyota-branded and Honda’s Honda-branded vehicles in the same 2005 J.D. Powers survey.

In Consumer Reports predicted reliability ratings, brands like Toyota, Subaru and even Suzuki rank higher than Pontiac, which has average predicted reliablity in Consumer Reports’ estimation.
Lincoln, the top-ranked American brand in the J.D. Power survey, is seen as having below average predicted reliability by Consumer Reports.

Still, agreed Michael Quincy automotive content specialist for Consumer Reports, the quality of Ford and GM cars has improved greatly in recent years.

Some Ford cars are actually “above average” in reliability, according to Consumer Reports own surveys, Quincy said. GM brands, according to Consumer Reports, have mostly average predicted reliability.

Reputation: Toyota has, by now, had a lifetime to cement its reputation among American consumers for nearly fool-proof quality. GM and Ford spent nearly as long honing a reputation for not caring much about quality. It’s a big company, it sells a lot of vehicles and they share a lot of components.

Reviews: GM and Ford vehicles haven’t always exuded quality that may have been hiding in there somewhere. GM and Ford deserve credit for what they’ve done so far.
There are problems with Ford and General Motors.

On paper Ford appears to have it much easier. Despite losing $1.6 billion in North America last year, Ford Motor remains profitable. The Taurus, Ford’s bestselling car in 2005, is being discontinued in 2006 (it hopes the Fusion will fill the vacuum). To get his company up to speed again, Bill Ford has produced the second turnaround plan of his tenure, called ‘Way Forward’.

The plan promises cost cuts, improved quality, and increased productivity. The good news is that within the American borders, General Motors is still the king with around 40 percent market share and Toyota has 15 percent.

Changing World

Companies like Nissan driven by visionary CEO Ghosn has been making some of the best cars off late. They are listening to the consumers while the American companies are not. No wonder that now he is also the CEO of Renault the French company and combined Nissan and Renault are in the top 5 manufacturers worldwide and have a 9.6% market share.

The company plans to increase global vehicle sales in the year ended March 31 by 6.8 percent to a record 3.62 million units.

However, the markets are unrelenting but the American manufacturers are going to suffer more. If I want to buy a car, I will buy the best car available and an American manufacturer does not make that best car according to customers’ needs. The tragedy of the American automobile/car industry is that we are not listening to the consumers and have the terrible reputation of making bad cars. The Japanese on the other hand realized that Japan is a much smaller country which cannot absorb all the cars they can make and choose to sell their cars to the American market.