Importing a car or are there better options?

Hi,
Myself and my husband have just purchased a house in Quesada which is due to complete on 31st October this year where we will then be moving on a full time basis and will also be registered as spanish residents.

We plan to drive over to Spain with our personal belongings but I am very confused in terms of the best options for buying our car. In Spain as you will know the prices of cars are alot more expensive than they are in the UK. Our plan is to buy a LHD, spanish registered car in the UK. However I can't find any real answers in terms of what the process would be. I've read you have to purchase it 6 months before to avoid import taxes, will this apply? Will there be any charges etc we should know about?

If anybody has any advice on what the best options are we would really appreciate it.

We look forward to joining the Quasada community

Firstly, only older cars are more expensive in Spain. New cars can be cheaper and cars up to 3 or 4 years old are about the same price. When they get older than that, they retain their value and are more expensive than in UK. As an example, our new car in Spain was some €3000 cheaper than UK and a 3 yr old Ford Focus we had before that cost €7100 (just over £5000) but cars about 6 or 7 years old were 4 to 5000 euro so much more expensive that UK. A 12 year old car, typically, was around €3000.
Reference the new ones, as an example the top of the range Hyundai 1.6 turbo in UK is £22500. Here in Spain it is €25600 or about £18600. (only picked that one because I had an email about it).

Yes, you need to have owned the car in UK for 6 months or more. Than means you can't have it on Spanish registration as a UK citizen can't drive a foreign registered car in UK and it has to have been registered in UK. That means it will have been deregistered in Spain and have UK plates
Bringing it over, you must start the re-registration process within 30 days of arrival so it is classed as a personal item (like all the stuff you bring over) to avoid import tax even though it was originally registered in Spain.
You also have to make sure there are no outstanding road tax bills on it as you would be liable for any unpaid years.
You would have to pay the registration tax which can vary between 0 and 14.75% of the value depending on CO2 emissions (this is reduced depending on the age of the car) plus an ITV (MOT) test.

Thanks Marcliff. I appreciate what you mean about the age of the car and holding values in Spain.
We would be looking at a 2nd hand car so its definately cheaper to buy from the UK. However as we wont have owned the car for 6 months we would have to pay import tax which probably doesnt make it worth while?
I'm just trying to work out whether its more cost effective / alot easier to buy a spanish car in the UK and take it back to spain..
Or keep our existing car and replace it when we get to Spain.

In our case, we drove our UK car over with all the stuff we wanted. We then bought a car here (from Goldcar sales in Torrevieja). We then drove back to UK in the Brit car and transferred it to our daughter who sold it for us. We then flew back to Spain.
There are dealers here who will buy your UK car off you if you buy a Spanish car from them but we found they'd give us Brit second hand prices for the car (ie not a lot) and charge Spanish prices for the one we were buying (ie quite a lot).

Hi HayleyB

We moved over to Quesada last year and purchased our LHD car from the Left Hand Drive Centre in Basingstoke on British plates and re registered when we arrived here. This cost about 800 euros, utilising a guy called Graham Shelton from Spanish Number Plates to complete all the paperwork and arrange the ITV/MOT. All in all and excellent service for the money.

There are a couple of companies in England that also sell Spanish registered cars, I think one is called LHD Supermarket. If they haven't got what you want they can try to source it for you. You will need your NIE number to purchase a Spanish registered car in U.K.

Having also purchased a second car here in Spain, I do think you get a better second hand deal in U.K. with lower mileages/kilometres.

Hope this is of help.

Thanks for the help.. it seemed easier buying the house than it does getting my head around the car situation

if you buy a car in th uk that is still on the spanish register then you are not importing it, if all the documents are in order you have 30 days to do the ownership transfer in spain. you can contact one of the local people here that deal with traffico and they will be able to tell how much transfer tax you will have to pay

Thanks Jim, thats a huge help. I didnt think it would be possible because we wont have our NIE number until we get to spain. But if we have 30 days then it makes perfect sense to do it that way. Thats cleared things up for me, thanks for all the advice everyone.

We brought our car over 4 years ago, already had an NIE as had owned property for several years ...To avoid paying Import Tax which was over 2000Euros we had to get residencia .... it also cost us almost a 1000 euros to register the car ITV etc...at that time our car was 3 years old, we decided to bring car with us as buying the same car here was very expensive ....having lived in Germany for a number of years it doesn't bother us the car being right hand drive nor does it affect insurance ....Good Luck