Date:         Thu, 2 Sep 1999 10:39:05 EDT
Reply-To:     KENWILFY@AOL.COM
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         KENWILFY@AOL.COM
Subject:      The skinny on importing German Vanagons!
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

OK as of right now our importing deal for the German, 1.7l diesel Vanagons,
is on hold.  Here is what I found out:
It makes your importing of a vehicle much easier if it is on an approved list
that the DOT has.  This means that the conformity work has been done on this
year vehicle and it was found to be close enough to US spec to be doable.

A couple of years ago no Vanagons were on this list.  Just within the past
two years the '90 Vanagon was added to the list and within the last couple of
months the '88-89 Vanagons were added to the list as well!  This means that
the risk of your van being destroyed by the DOT or EPA for not conforming to
thier regs is practically zero if you import a van from these three years.
This is great news for folks wanting to import Vanagons!

The other thing I found out was that each van has to come through customs and
through DOT and EPA inspections after it has been modified to conform to US
standards.  Some vehicles are very close and may need little to no mods.  For
these vans I got an estimate of $5000-7000 each to bring them through customs
and make them conform to US regs.  This is for the 88-90 Vanagons only since
they are on the list.  If you want other years it could be more.  So add this
to the cost of $2500 for these later model vans, plus $800-1000 for shipping
and the 2.7% tariff and we come to a cost of around $10,500 on the high side
and $8500 on the low side each for these vans if we brought 10 or more over
at a time.  So this is alot of money to invest in a used van.  If you took
the van and spent an additional $3000 to camperize it I believe that you
would have a vehicle that you could resell for every penny you put into it,
if not a little more, but this is alot of money up front for a van (let me
know what you think).

If you were to bring a van over by yourself, your shipping would be higher
(around $2500 for Detlev's crewcab which should be here in 6 to 8 weeks).

The final hurdle is the diesel powerplant.  I talked to several importers of
grey market cars.  Some didn't deal with diesels at all while others were
positive that they could make the vans legal.  It seems that in the late 80's
the EPA standards for diesel emissions went up.  So our 1.7l diesel van might
have to have catalytic convertors and other adjustments to pass emissions.

So here is the good, the bad, and the ugly.  If you still are gung-ho on
importing these vans after reading all of this then we can still do it.  But
I just wanted to let you folks know what all was involved before we went any
further.

Is it worth doing?  If you have the money, yes.  If you don't then it isn't.
That's as simple as it gets.
Let me know what you think.
Ken Wilford
Van-Again
John 3:16