Moving from U.S. to Austria - is it worth shipping AE86 GTS?

[Mux213]

Ivan141 Wrote:The US models got the whole she-bang, so I would be pretty confident your car will pass emissions. Afaik, you dont have to comply with modern day emission standards, as long as you comply to the demands the car was built for in a certain country.

Exactly, the key word is that the car was sold in Europa. Officially by European law Austria can jump high and low, because the car was sold in Europa free European trade laws dictate the car should be tradeable in Austria. The keyword being any car having type approval within a country in the EU.
Unfortunately each European country has ways around those laws but in general it holds (for instance, some countries do not allow cars older then 10 years to be imported, but also emission laws are exemptions provided the emission laws in place at the time the car was build are applied).

This is the problem we have with importing cars that where never sold inside Europa like a Skyline. There is no type approval within Europa for these cars, hence there is no law that forces a country to allow the car to be imported. Here is where the UK comes as it had a thriving kitcar business sector that suddenly found they could not legally put any car on the road within the new EU laws. The UK had to come up with a type approval system that would allow cars to be type approved but without the normal crash tests and such that usually come along with it.

They came up with a Single Vehical A??? (sorry can't recall what the A stand for) which basically allows you to type approve a single car based on UK law for the build year of the car. For kitcars the build year being inherited from the donor car used (provided enough parts are reused).

The nice thing being that as soon as you have type approval for your car in the UK any European country MUST allow importing the car.

This opened the door to importing cars never sold in the EU as well as you just state you have a kit car reusing 100% of the parts of the donor car I believe the SVA actually has specific regulations regarding imports as here two, existing business in the UK would have suffered under new EU laws.

It does mean importing into the UK, paying import taxes there, paying for the SVA, then importing into the final country, paying (less) taxes again and paying for another import approval process.

By now a number of other European countries have similar scheme's like Germany and Holland though many with much stricter rules then the UK one (The one in Holland is targeted at building limited volume production cars where full type approval tests are impossible but is generally too expensive for a one off build/import)

Again, for hachi's this is NOT important. Hachi's where sold in many EU countries and have type approval in many EU countries. The only issue you could have is that Trueno's weren't sold here, only Levins, but they are the same car. So all that should stand in your way are the amount of tax you need to pay and 1984 emission rules in Austria which even if they are strict doubtfully will be as strict as California.