Used car imports rising as sterling value undermines local prices

If the importing of used cars from the United Kingdom has not yet quite become the post-Brexit flood that many had been anticipating, then it has certainly been upgraded from a trickle.

According to figures from motorcheck.ie, the number of used imports in the period since the value of sterling tumbled in the aftermath of the Brexit vote has gone up by more than 50 per cent.

From June 23rd to September 15th this year, 16,791 used cars were imported, the overwhelming number of them from the UK. That compares with 10,986 used imports in the same period in 2015.

The figure for August has the starkest contrast – 6,511 cars this year compared with 3,738 in 2015. September so far is running at 3,150 used imports, ahead of the 2015 number of 2,046 and there was an especially large spike of 604 cars imported in the one day, on September 15th.

Up until now the advice has been that it’s not really worth your while going to the UK to shop for a car unless you were spending upwards of €20,000 on a high-end model such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes.

Now though, that seems to have changed and buyers of much more workaday fare have been finding that they are making savings by personally importing a car.

Ashley Winston runs Palmdale Inc, a company that specialises in locating specific cars for customers and he’s seen some significant increases in calls and purchases from Ireland in recent weeks.

“A client came to us looking for a Toyota Auris. Now normally, we try to tell people that they’re not going to make a big enough saving on a car like that to make it worth their while, but this buyer was adamant and said he’d done his sums. He spent £5,590 on a 2011 Auris, flew to Heathrow to collect it and drove it back, and he still insisted to us that we has saving money compared to buying one at home.”

As an aside, Winston also told us that he was sourcing a high-performance 2009 Audi RS6 estate for a senior banking executive, as that person had decided that his previous Porsche was just too flash to commute in. It seems that there’s certainly money in some circles, anyway.

It’s the savings on mass-market cars that are far more significant. With the used car trade in Ireland still short of good three to four-year-old cars, Irish dealers could well be finding themselves with problems in the coming months, as buyers begin to think that Brexit might also mean bargains.