How do I Ship a Car to Spain?
If you are making a permanent relocation to Spain and you wish to take your car then you can ship your car to Europe. According to freight company Schumacher Cargo, shipping generally takes three to four weeks and once you're in the country you have six months before you need to re-register the vehicle. Importing a car from the United States to Europe can be tricky and so check all details beforehand with the Spanish authorities as well as car import companies to avoid making costly mistakes.
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Things You'll Need
- Car
- Registration details
- Valid driver's licence for Spain
- Car import company
- Telephone
Instructions
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Contact the Spanish Embassy to check whether your vehicle must pay any import duty. According to car shipping company Car Import in Spain, if you have owned your car for at least six months you should be able to import it without paying duty.
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Contact a specialist car import company to check the best and least expensive way to import your car. Straight-forward is not always the least expensive way to get your car to Spain. For example, Car Import in Spain suggests that in some cases it is cheaper to send the car to the United Kingdom first and register it with United Kingdom plates before sending it to Spain.
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Decide how you want your car to travel. You can either have it driven onto a ship and secured with a group of cars or have it travel in its individual crate. If you have chosen to have a company import your car, they will make arrangements with the shipping company. If not then you need to phone around yourself and negotiate a price.
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Pick up your car from a designated dock in Spain. To do so you will need your driver's license, passport and registration details to prove that it is your vehicle. If your car is being imported by a company then they'll pick it up for you, however, you must give them your registration documents plus photocopies of your passport for customs officials. According to Schumacher Cargo you can legally drive your car in Spain for six months, providing you have a valid driver's license, insurance and documents to show that it is roadworthy.
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Begin the process to obtain Spanish number plates before the six months is up. To do this Schumacher Cargo suggests that your U.S. car may need some rewriting to meet European specifications. Re-registering your car is a complicated process and is not recommended by Car Import In Spain unless you speak fluent Spanish. If in doubt use a specialist import company which will do all the paperwork for you.
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References
- Photo Credit a car in a car show image by Gary from Fotolia.com
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Comments
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Must correct a critical point in this article. If you ship a car into Spain from outside of the EU ( including US), and you have owned it for six months, then it can be imported tax free. However, to do this you need to get the paperwork right before the car arrives in order to retrieve the car from the port without the taxes being payable. More crucially, and the part of the article which needs correcting, is that you have only 60 days ( not 6 months) to get the car on Spanish plates. If you don´t , then the port paperwrok will be out of date, and all taxes will be payale ( up to 42.75% of vehicle value) For this reason you should contact car import in Spain right at the start to make sure that this doesn´t happen. Yes, you can use a car for six months in Spain before importing it ( although , tecnically, not a US plated one) but the point is you will be paying the taxes if you leave it that long and you shipped the car from outside of the EU, regardless of how you handled the paperwrok six months previously.
