Looking to import a car from Hong Kong into Vancouver - need help
 

Just planning ahead, looking to move back and bringing my IS300 in HK back with me.

Car is over 15 years old so it will be exempt from the Motor Vehicle Safety Act. It will still need to go through provincial inspection.

Anyone knows any reputable company that provides importation/inspection services in BC? Thanks in advance. :D

impactX :ahwow:

I PM'd you with more details, but first place comes to mind for inspection is The Speed Syndicate. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the importation part unfortunately. Hopefully someone can chime in on this.

You can contact support@RIV.ca and they can point you in the right direction regarding how to import the car. I'm not sure if TSS will do out of province inspections but it took a while to find a shop that was willing to do JDM cars for me personally. Some shops will do inspections for BC vehicles only, some will do OOP but refuse to work on JDM cars. Your car will also need to go through customs and I've found it easier to get a company to do it for you versus doing it yourself. The couple hundred dollars is definitely worth it to save the headache.

wow...impactx is still here...lol and you are moving back?! wHYYY?
have you figured out how to dereg the license in HK and send the car to the near port? any company is doing it?

Not yet moving back but planning to in the coming years. I think TD won’t care if my car is still registered, as I will need to show CBSA that the title of the car belongs to me.

There are plenty of companies that would ship to UK or Australia, but I have not found one yet that would ship to Canada. I guess it is simply not common for someone to keep a car for over 6 years in Hong Kong, let alone the 15 years required to import it into Canada. I will be asking around more actively.

Edit: I got your pm from last year lol, will be in contact

yes, people generally sell their car before 6yrs, but it is strange how much young people are spending on buying 20yrs old JDM.

RIV isn't going to help here.

I used Courtney Agency (Courtney.ca) to deal with Customs and arrange for the car to be moved from the dock to a decent warehouse on Annacis Island.

They were very helpful, and things were generally easy, but if I was looking to save some money I think I'd find someone else to pickup the container and destuff it.

I've had to call around a few places for inspection. ICBC seems to be going after a lot of these guys and very few are willing to risk sticking their neck out to approve a RHD car even if it's safe. I think they are worried that there is an obscure problem that they'll miss and ICBC will throw the book at them. It's absolute BS, but that's ICBC for you. 7 years ago I had my defender approved with zero hassle, but it's just not that easy anymore.

Keep the reg handy, and something to backup your declared value and you obviously need your BOL. If you ship anything else in the same container you'll need to declare the value of that too.

You will need a binder of insurance to drive it home. Most brokers try to make it seem like if you don't get it inspected and registered by the end of that binder then you're boned. However, you can get a day reg after that for an inspection if you need to.

I would have to think there's a direct route from HK to Vancouver, so it shouldn't be hard to have a container brought over. Maybe RoRo is a little more tricky.