FAQ

The answer to this question is extremely simple; a used Japanese car will be cheap and will be in extremely good condition for its age and have very low mileage—actually kilometers. You can typically expect a 5 year old vehicle to have less than 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles). Even a ten year vehicle will rarely have driven more than 80, 000 kilometers. And, of course, people buy cars from Japan because they get a much better car for their money than they would do in their own country.

But how can it be that they have such low mileage, you may ask yourself. That, also, is not a difficult question to answer. There are, essentially, three reasons for this, however, to answer the question, you need to understand a bit about Japanese culture. Allow us to explain.

Firstly, all Japanese companies pay for a monthly rail pass for all their employees to travel to and from work everyday. Whether they work full time or part time, all workers are given a rail pass. Japanese train systems are super efficient, run on time to the very minute, and never go on strike. So nobody wants leave home an hour and half earlier to sit in traffic jams for hours and pay expensive gasoline prices for the pleasure.

Secondly, Japanese people are world famous for their dedication to their companies and the very long hours they work; most employees rarely returning home before nine or ten o'clock at night. Therefore, at the weekends (which is usually just a Sunday because most people work on Saturdays), they just want to relax and take it easy at home and rarely use their car except to go to the local supermarket for the weekly shopping.

Also, although Japan is a rich and thriving world economy it has a gigantic population living in a small amount of space and so highways and freeways are exceptionally narrow by comparison to other countries of the developed world. When a national holiday or a long weekend comes around and every man and his dog want to get out of town, it naturally leads to incredible traffic jams and congestion. In fact, it can often take hours to travel relatively small distances. So it is very difficult for vehicles to accrue miles/kilometers.

Initially, I should explain that we do not carry stock as this enables us to provide vehicles at lower prices because we don't need to pay large rents for lot space to park vehicles until they sell. This enables us to cut costs and pass the savings on to you. We work on a personal one-to-one service to car dealers, distributors, and private buyers worldwide.

The first step is for our clients give us as much detail as possible about the vehicle(s) they want. For example: make, model, color, the maximum mileage that you would accept, engine size, fuel; gas, diesel, or propane, transmission; standard (manual in UK English) or automatic transmission, and any options you especially want. Also, if possible, give us the first six letters and figures of a chassis number (sometimes called a VIN number or frame number depending on who you are talking to). Of course, most importantly, we need to know what your budget is for a particular vehicle.

We then send you the most current prices on your desired vehicle(s) and if it suits your budget, you tell us to go ahead and acquire the vehicle(s) of your choice.

When we find a vehicle that will meet your requirements and budget, we send you pictures of it and along with the pictures we send you a copy of the vehicle's data sheet. This gives details of its history and present condition. It will inform if the vehicle has had a collision, if there is damage to vehicle, such as scratches or dents to the body work, the interior condition, if there is some engine noise, if there are oil leaks, etc. The information on these data sheets is provided by strictly regulated, government authorized, independent inspectors These inspectors are meticulous in there examinations, so you can be sure that the information is very accurate.

If you are happy with the vehicle after checking the pictures and data sheet, you confirm it's OK and tell us to go ahead, we try to buy it for you.

After we have made a purchase, we handle all the paperwork involved at this end; we arrange, transfer of ownership documentation, shipping documentation, Japanese tax documentation, etc., and we take care of all the shipping arrangements. The JAAI inspection fees, transporter fees from purchase site to our depot and then to the port, the port handling fees and the fees of loading on to the ship all is inclusive. This is termed FOB (Free On Board). In other words, when you give us your budget, we will include all of these costs in the price.

Although we make all the shipping arrangements and have the vehicle loaded on board the ship, you are responsible for the all the shipping costs (often termed freight costs) from Japan to the port that you ask us to ship it to. You are also responsible for collecting the vehicle from that port. We do not arrange delivery from that port to your place of business or home location.

We are happy to supply vehicles to private individual buyers but if you are not one of our registered dealers and have not placed a bond with us, we require a deposit; the amount of the deposit will depend on the price of the vehicle(s) you want to buy. Upon us successfully completing a purchase for you, the complete balance must be paid within 5 business days. In the unlikely event that we cannot find the type of vehicle that you want, your entire deposit will be refunded immediately at your request.

If you are a dealer (or are starting out as one) and intend buying vehicles with us on a regular basis, it would be much cheaper and more convenient for you to place a bond with us. The bond is 180,000 Japanese yen (approximately 1,000 Euros, US $1,500, or 800 British pounds sterling). After we have completed three successful transactions together we refund 40% of your bond. If you decide to cease trading with us, we refund the complete balance of your bond-assuming that you have no outstanding accounts with us, of course.

A deposit is an initial part-payment on a vehicle that a buyer has decided to purchase. This payment will be deducted from the total purchase price of that vehicle. A deposit would be the way to go for a private individual who is buying only one vehicle. For example, if you ask us to buy a vehicle for you and you tell us that your budget for that vehicle is 900,000 Japanese yen, you would pay us a deposit of 200,000 yen and after we buy the vehicle, you would pay us the balance of 700,000 yen. If you decided to buy more than one vehicle, you would have to pay a deposit on each vehicle every time you place an order.

A bond is for traders, dealers, and distributors or people starting up as a one of these and would be buying vehicles on a regular basis. This bond is held for as long as a dealer or distributor continues to do business with us. A bond is not deducted from the price of vehicles purchased; instead the buyer will be invoiced the full purchase price after we have bought their vehicle(s) and we retain their bond. For people who intend to buy vehicles regularly, placing a bond simplifies the buying process and saves the buyer a lot of time and expensive bank charges. There are several other important and major benefits to placing a bond with us.

So in summary, the difference between a bond and deposit is that the deposit must be paid on each and every vehicle that you want to buy and it will be deducted from the total cost of your purchase, but the bond will not be. Unlike the deposit, you only pay the bond one time and it is held by us, in escrow if you like. When you have placed a bond with us you can order vehicles without having to send any deposit, but you would pay the full balance after we have bought the vehicle and arranged the shipping for you. Your one-time bond payment would remain with us until you decide to cease trading.

As previously mentioned, we don't carry stock. All of the vehicles we buy for our customers are bought on a one-to-one specific order basis. Therefore, if we buy a vehicle for a customer and that customer suddenly has a change of mind and decides that he or she doesn't want it, we then have a vehicle that we don't want and have no customer to buy it. Naturally this will put us to great expense to re-sell the vehicle. Apart from all the costs of re-registration and documentation and re-auctioning costs, we take a great loss on the re-sale because, naturally, all the other dealers who were interested the car the week before will realize that we bought previous week and now we are selling it again this week. Obviously they will think there must be a problem. So clearly the bidding will be low and we will take loss at all ends. Therefore, we have to safeguard ourselves and ask for a bond, L/Cs, or deposit to safeguard ourselves against this possibility.

By placing a bond with us you are given access to our so called "Members Page". This is a password-secure area of our website that allows regular buyers, traders, dealers several excellent features to help you manage and operate your business more smoothly and efficiently. Amongst some of these excellent features are:

Amongst some of these excellent features are: being
Being able to keep track of all you shipping progress

All your purchases and invoicing are recorded in Microsoft Excel format in order of purchase date. This gives you a readily available history for your accountant without you having to do all the paperwork; thus saving you hours of work.

You have a history of all your vehicles purchased complete with pictures and the data sheets history of those vehicles.

Another fantastic feature of membership is you are able view all vehicles that will be auctioned the following day. This allows you time to browse at your leisure and decide which vehicle(s) you would like us to buy for you. You can even make bids LIVE on Line on the same day of the auction!

Once you have decided on your choice of vehicle(s) and determined your costs, you should contact me and I will tell what kind price you should expect to buy your vehicle for and how much you can expect to pay for shipping fees, etc.

The first thing that you have to do is decide what vehicle(s) you want to buy, what age, condition, and what mileage on the vehicle is acceptable (obviously the higher the mileage, the cheaper the vehicle). The next thing is to determine how much that vehicle would cost to buy in your own country, or, if you are a trader, how much you can sell the vehicle(s) for.

Next, if you are trader, you must decide how much profit you want from the vehicles you intend to purchase and therefore, how much you need to "land it" for to realize that margin. If you are buying for your own personal use, you should calculate how much cheaper your purchase must be to make it worth your time to import from abroad. Also, as private individual purchaser buying for your own personal use, you should always keep firmly in mind that even if you buy a vehicle at the same price as you would pay in your own country, you will get much more car for your money by buying from Japan. Also, you know that you can trust that the mileage on the "clock" is accurate and has not been turned back

Either way, whether you are a trader or private buyer, once you determined these figures, you should bid to the limit of your budget to ensure that you get the vehicle of your choice. Naturally, you only pay what we pay for the vehicle. If you give us a budget of, say, 600,000 yen and we are able to buy your vehicle for 400,000 yen. You would only be billed the 400,000 yen that we paid. This means a saving of 200,000 yen. That saving is passed back on to you. If we are able to buy your vehicle(s) cheaper than your bid limit, we do NOT bill you the full amount that you wished to bid up to.

Possibly, you have many more questions. If so, why not send us an e-mail with your phone number and the best time to contact you (your local time)? We will be most happy to give you a call, discuss all your needs, and answer all of your questions no matter how simple or complicated they may be. Alternatively, give us call and we'll call you right back. You can find all of our contact information at the Contact page.