That £9,000 Toyota Voxy you're watching on Goo-net will land on your driveway costing closer to £14,000 once everything's paid.
The auction price is roughly two-thirds of what you'll actually spend, and almost nobody quotes it that way upfront.
This is a guide to the other third.
The 2026 number that changed everything
Until December 2025, importing a Japanese car carried a 1.3% customs duty under the UK-Japan trade agreement (CEPA). From January 2026 that dropped to 0%. On a £15,000 car plus £1,500 shipping, you've just saved around £214. It's not life-changing, but combined with a softer yen, 2026 is a genuinely better time to import than 2024 or 2025 were.
One catch worth flagging straight away: the 0% rate only applies if the car was manufactured in Japan. A BMW that happened to be sold and registered in Japan does not qualify. HMRC caught at least one buyer last year for £1,100 in unexpected duty and penalty after their 2018 BMW 5 Series was reclassified as German-built. Check the chassis number before you bid, not after.
The real cost stack
Here's where the money actually goes on a 2017 Toyota Voxy bought at auction for £9,000:
- Auction price: £9,000
- Auction fees and Japanese inland transport to port: £400
- RoRo shipping to Southampton or Bristol (about 6 weeks): £1,400
- UK port handling and customs clearance: £300
- Import duty (0% for qualifying Japanese-built cars in 2026): £0
- VAT at 20% on the CIF value: ~£2,140
- DVLA registration and first-year VED: £105
- Mandatory modifications (speedometer to mph, headlights to dip right, rear fog light): £350
- IVA test (only for cars under 10 years old): £199
Total: £13,894 to drive a £9,000 car.
The VAT alone is bigger than every other fee combined. Anyone who tells you they imported a car for "just the auction price and shipping" forgot to mention the 20% on top of both.
When the 10-year rule saves you serious money
Cars over ten years old skip the Individual Vehicle Approval test entirely. They need a standard MOT instead. That's roughly £200 off the IVA bill, but the bigger saving is on the modifications: most of the items the IVA inspectors fail cars for (lighting, speedo, emissions paperwork) either don't apply or are checked far more leniently at MOT.
This is why JDM classics — Skylines, Supras, Land Cruisers — make sense to import in a way that a three-year-old Aqua usually doesn't. The age qualifies them for the easier route, and most of them aren't sold in the UK to begin with.
Who shouldn't bother
If you want a Toyota Yaris, buy one here. The same model is on AutoTrader for similar money, with UK service history, no shipping wait, no IVA paperwork, no risk of a customs error costing you an extra £1,000. Importing only makes sense for cars that either (a) aren't sold in the UK at all (Hiace, Voxy, Alphard, JDM performance models) or (b) cost meaningfully less after all fees than the equivalent UK car. For everything else, the maths doesn't work.
I'd add a third audience to skip: anyone who'd find a three-month wait, an IVA failure list, or a missing rear fog light genuinely upsetting. The process rewards patience, not optimism.
What to do next:
Three things to nail down before you commit to a specific car:
- Verify country of manufacture from the chassis number, not the brand. The 0% duty depends on it. A Mazda 6 built in Hiroshima qualifies. A Mazda 6 built in Hofu may or may not, depending on the year. Ask, don't assume.
- Get the auction sheet translated by someone who knows the grading system. Grade 4, 4.5, R, RA — these tell you more about what you're buying than any number of photos. A Grade 4.5 with a clean sheet is genuinely a different car from a Grade 3 with a repair notation, even if they look identical online.
- Run the full cost stack on the specific car, not a rough percentage. Shipping varies by port. VAT varies by car value. IVA depends on model year. The "add 30%" rule is fine for back-of-envelope, useless when you're about to wire £15,000 to Japan.
The 2026 changes have made importing slightly cheaper and slightly faster than it was eighteen months ago. Slightly. Read that twice before you assume it's now easy.
