Tahrey1043 wrote:you cant legally import cars from outside the country?
the dealers must be hellish desperate to stop people buying used cars if even a rear wiper is an option now... that sort of thing disappeared here about 20 year ago (ie standard safety device)
strange.....
One can legally import a new car. Well, a company can, because a private individual would not have the patience to fill in all the paperwork. And by the time you've paid all the taxes, the car would cost almost twice as much as it did in the country of origin.
Used imports are a no-no for us. Otherwise I'd fly to Argentina and buy some well-equipped car for nearly half the price it costs here. Or I'd hit eBay...
In the 1990s import duties and quotas were all but lifted in Brazil, so we had a flood of properly built and equipped cars competing with the locally-made models. The locally-installed multinationals had to upgrade equipment and safety in order to compete.
The "local" manufacturers (Ford, VW, Fiat, GM, Peugeot/Citroën, Renault, Toyota and Honda) have since managed to restrict imports again, so they basically face no competition.
And they compete to see who offers the least and still manages to sell a car.
It started with the Chevrolet Celta, an extreme-poverty Corsa-in-a-drag. Awful little thing. It did sell, though, so all manufacturers realized they could get away with this "no-safety-or-basic-equipment" policy.
We've since had to pay extra for rear wipers, de-frosters and fog lights. Not to mention the fact that side repeaters have been deleted even in models that originally had them in Europe (Corsa, Meriva, Astra, Fiesta, the list goes on...)
Airbags and ABS? Forget it. To get a double Airbag system in a small car you have to buy all the equipment packages on the most expensive models in the line-up. And in some cases airbags are only mentioned in sales brochures, because in the real world it's impossible to buy a car with them, and salespeople will tell you so (Peugeot 206, VW Polo, Ford Fiesta, Chevrolet Corsa, Astra, Meriva, VW Golf 1.6, and the list goes on and on).
All these cars had airbags and (optional) ABS in their 1990s models. The newer version have front seatbelts (no pretensioners in most cases) and in most cases you have to pay extra for an automatic rear 3-point belt (they do come with 2 three-point belts in the rear as it's mandatory, but the law doesn't say that they have to automatic so we end up with seatbelts that we have to adjust by ourselves!).
Side airbags are unheard of.
ABS is for £32.000 Volvo S40s (yes, they START at that price)
I have some real horror stories that happen in dealers everyday, because since they face no competition anyway they just don't care about after-sales service. We're probably having to sue Peugeot over a £5 piece of trim that came missing in the car and they refuse to fit. It's not the cost of the part, you see, it's the fact that it came missing in my brother's 206 and they simply don't care about it (and are asking £20 parts and labour to have it fitted).
Our cars have 1-year warranties full of strings attached. And boy do we need that warranty!
And the irony is, the export cars have all that equipment and end up costing less to the consumers in places like South Africa, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Chile, not to mention Europe.
The situation is so bad VW has two different factories producing the new VW Fox: one supplies the Brazilian market, and the other will supply Europe. Europe-bound cars, you see, will have a lot more equipment and will have to be built "more attentively", as a local VW official has recently proclaimed.
Manufacturers are so bullish about this they claim that "Brazilians don't like safety equipment and prefer a better stereo" (not true), "the new Fiat Pand is too sophiscated for the local maket, with a lot of equipment that would make it prohibively expensive here" (from a Fiat spokesman), "Brazil is not ready for the safety equipments that we fit to our European line, for example" (again a VW man, explaining why the optional double airbags had been dropped from the Gol and Polo lines in late 2003).
You guys in the UK are spoilt for choice.
Here it's "silver 1.4 with electric windows" and that's it (choice of colour for the 2005 VW Polo line is black, silver, dark grey, metallic red, metallic green, and erm... that's it).
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