11:33 am, June 16, 2025
If you’ve been keeping up our regular video series following the fortunes of The Clever Car Collection, you’ll be aware that some months ago the team took a trip to Japan to explore the world of imports.
Our very own James Baggott headed off to the land of the rising sun with Car Dealer’s Jon Reay, with the pair shown round the country’s vast used car auction scene by Nichibo’s Chay Anderson.
The trip resulted in six cars being purchased for The Clever Car Collection, all of which recently arrived in the UK after weeks of waiting.
However, since then, things have been far from straightforward and the dealership’s resident Jack-of-all trades, Joe Wallington appeared on the Car Dealer Podcast to explain how the process has worked.
As luck would have it, he was joined by both James and Jon on the show and he was quick to berate the pair for lumbering him with ‘six problems’ in the shape of the imported cars.
He joked: ‘What basically has happened there is you two went on holiday, and now I’ve got six problems sat behind me, and no way of knowing how to deal with them.
‘I’ve had to check books, send paper forms to varying government agencies, and spend many hours on hold to varying government officials trying to tell me what to do with them and I still don’t know!’
‘Joking aside, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s interesting to learn how you do these things, but my word, I did not think that the stress, the paperwork, or just the list of people you have to pay, things you have to do, forms you have to fill in, was anywhere near what it has been.
‘And we’re probably only two-thirds of the way through.’
During his chat, Joe explained that while some of the cars could be driven off the boat, others had to be lifted off in shipping containers.
This meant that the dealership had to pay £350 per car for specialists to get them out of the units before they could be brought back to the firm’s Gosport base.
While now back at the showroom, the vehicles remain unregistered due to complications in the process and as a result, cannot be left on public property.
It means that the team are constantly having to reshuffle stock to make sure that the imports are kept inside overnight.
Explaining some of the issues, Joe said: ‘For complicated reasons, they went on a boat that no one knew about. The container was lifted off of the boat onto, I think, the dockside at Southampton for some weeks before eventually somebody phoned me and said, “I think you own what’s in this container, could you deal with it?”.
‘Then we paid a company quite a lot of money, it turns out, to move this container, deal with it, unload them, damage some of them somewhere along the line – something went wrong, I think, somewhere – that’s all included in the price and here they are now with us.’
The Car Dealer Podcast, sponsored by Carwow, sees an industry guest join our hosts to discuss the motor trade’s biggest headlines of every week.
A full list of the stories discussed on this week’s episode can be found here.
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