Is it legal to buy a new car in Mexico and bring it back to the US?

[SteveG1988]

The price of new cars has actually decreased since 1996 relative to inflation.

The cost of all this now mandated safety equipment is marginal compared to what it used to cost. Remember, back in the day a mercedes having an airbag was a big deal.

[vdeane]

The price of new cars has actually decreased since 1996 relative to inflation.

Well, that's certainly something the NMA has never mentioned.  Still, it certainly seems like cars are more unaffordable than they once were.  A high school student used to be able to afford a decent car on a summer job.  Not so now.  The points on repair costs (which no doubt affect insurance costs) certainly still apply.

Cash for clunkers certainly didn't help on that front, decreasing the supply of used cars when demand was sky high due to the recession.  Today, good used cars cost nearly as much as new (at least Hondas do, to the point where depreciation isn't really a thing within the first five years), and the only ones that are affordable are unreliable beaters.

[US 41]

I bought my car last year for $2700. I've put a lot of miles on it and it is supposedly worth $2100 now (very good condition). It was worth $2800 when I bought it, but a year and a half has passed and I've added nearly 30K miles to it since then. I'm hoping to get another 2 or more years out of it. I will probably get rid of it once it isn't reliable enough to take on long road trips anymore.

I'd like to say that in a couple of years I'll get a new car, but honestly I'm probably going to look for another car that is around 10 or so years old that runs great for around $3000. I like older cars because I can just purchase liability only insurance (as a young driver it is much cheaper for me), my plates are like $50 rather than $300, and I'm not driving a brand new car into Mexico (I don't want to look like a rich gringo).

[Duke87]

The price of new cars has actually decreased since 1996 relative to inflation.

Well, that's certainly something the NMA has never mentioned.  Still, it certainly seems like cars are more unaffordable than they once were.  A high school student used to be able to afford a decent car on a summer job.  Not so now.

Yes, well, the price of a used car has gone through the roof. Not just because of cash for clunkers, but also because
1) with cars lasting longer than they used to, what used to be a true clunker with one foot in the grave is now middle aged.
2) Thanks to item number 1 the economics of buying a used car are better than they were in the past, even at higher prices, and there isn't a stigma on buying a used car like their used to be. This has driven some people to buy a used car even when they can afford a new one for the sake of saving a bit of money.
3) There has been a lot of predatory lending on auto loans which has people buying cars which are not really in the best position to afford them. Continually low interest rates affect this as well. Via bubble economics this drives the price up.

With everyone looking to buy used, this has naturally dragged the retail price of new cars down because demand for them is lower - so dealers have to entice people to buy new cars somehow in order to generate future used cars.

[J N Winkler]

I wonder how that would work - if you drove into Mexico in a 1993 Sentra, told customs you were going down to Mexico to get the car restored, which while an odd thing to do would be completely legal, and drove back up in a 2016 Tsuru with swapped VINs? Obviously the VIN-swapping would be illegal, but what method would they have to identify it - especially since we don't have exit controls in the U.S.?

It's pretty hard to track down every single part that has a VIN on it.  On the 2005 Camry I use as a roadtrip vehicle, for example, I saw a VIN plate (that I was not at all expecting to see) on the back of the bumper assembly when I was inspecting damage from a deer collision.  You can try swapout of the windshield VIN plate, the FMVSS certification labels, the emissions labels, etc. but any VIN-marked part you miss that Customs knows to look for will give the game away.  There are bound to be VINs in locations (e.g., the spaceframe) that cannot reasonably be explained away as installation of salvage parts, and in any case it is a very strange 23-year-old car that has VIN-marked salvage parts from a vehicle barely a year old.  And this is without getting into the issue that (1) VINs identify country of manufacture and (2) there is little above-ground international traffic in auto salvage parts.

Or, for instance, if I lived in a state with no emissions testing, and drove a U.S. titled and registered 2016 Nissan Frontier to Mexico, and came back with the same 2016 Nissan Frontier, now with a Nissan diesel engine not available in the U.S., would that be legal? What level of car modification is legal to undertake in Mexico with a U.S. plated car?

There are a couple of layers to think about.

*  Specific vehicle approval.  If emissions from the diesel meets current federal standards, then it can be accepted as legal on a single-vehicle-import basis.  Seeking this type of approval would require you to be open with Customs about having modified the vehicle, instead of trying to pull a fast one by them, hoping they don't look under the hood and that there are no other visible or audible indications of substantial modification in Mexico.

*  Type approval.  I believe this can be applied for only by the manufacturer, not by the individual owner.  The main benefit of type approval is to avoid enforcement of specific compliance at the point of title issuance.

*  Emissions and safety inspection.  This is not an issue in a state that doesn't carry out such inspections, but can be an obstacle to replating in a jurisdiction that does, unless compliance can somehow be demonstrated (or faked).

There are ways to be quietly illegal.  There are plenty of people running around with custom engine management programs that somehow manage to survive California emissions inspection.  Similarly, there are plenty of people running HC-based A/C refrigerants in states that ban them.  But insurability can be at issue.  If, for example, you are knowingly running HC in a state that bans it, and you are in a crash where HC escaping from the A/C ignites and causes damage or injury, your insurance company can say you are not covered.

[J N Winkler]

I think you're misunderstanding–the idea would be to drive a '93 Sentra into Mexico, then move its VIN plate to a 2016 Tsuru. So you would have a VIN that matches the temporary import record. The issue would be whether the swap could be done professionally enough to avoid either the Mexican or US authorities noticing that the VIN had been tampered with.

Ah, gotcha.  But then you'd have a VIN on a different model of vehicle than the one you brought into México.  The import paperwork includes manufacturer, model year, and VIN.  Huge red flag.

I've already spelled out separately the reasons I don't think this scam would work (VIN-marked parts), but from the aduanal point of view in Mexico there is no problem, aside from the one of transferring a temporary vehicle import sticker from one vehicle to another without destroying it.  A 1993 Sentra comes into the country, and a 2016 Tsuru leaves the country with sticker, VIN identification, and badging belonging to the 1993 Sentra.  The problem is left in the Mexican interior:  somewhere in government records there is a 2016 Tsuru that has been granted a title in Mexico, and on which tenencias (registration taxes) are owed, which no longer physically exists in Mexico.

[ZLoth]

I was looking at some car called a Nissan Tsuru. Apparently, you can buy a brand new one in Chihuahua, Mexico for $7800 USD, which is dirt cheap for a new vehicle. Below is a photo of it. They kind of look like my father's old K Car.



There are some other cars down there that you can buy brand new for around $9K cheaper than you can in the good ol' USA where they constantly rip you off. So my question is could I take a greyhound bus down to Chihuahua, buy a Tsuru (or other car), bring it back to Indiana, and then get it plated here?

Uh, no, it's a bad idea. A very BAD idea.

Not only would there be an emissions issue, but the cars sold in Mexico are manufactured to a lower safety standard than what is required in the United States. That's why they're cheaper.

You are better off getting a previous daily rental from Hertz Car sales.

[kphoger]

I think you're misunderstanding–the idea would be to drive a '93 Sentra into Mexico, then move its VIN plate to a 2016 Tsuru. So you would have a VIN that matches the temporary import record. The issue would be whether the swap could be done professionally enough to avoid either the Mexican or US authorities noticing that the VIN had been tampered with.

Ah, gotcha.  But then you'd have a VIN on a different model of vehicle than the one you brought into México.  The import paperwork includes manufacturer, model year, and VIN.  Huge red flag.

I've already spelled out separately the reasons I don't think this scam would work (VIN-marked parts), but from the aduanal point of view in Mexico there is no problem, aside from the one of transferring a temporary vehicle import sticker from one vehicle to another without destroying it.  A 1993 Sentra comes into the country, and a 2016 Tsuru leaves the country with sticker, VIN identification, and badging belonging to the 1993 Sentra.  The problem is left in the Mexican interior:  somewhere in government records there is a 2016 Tsuru that has been granted a title in Mexico, and on which tenencias (registration taxes) are owed, which no longer physically exists in Mexico.

Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you're misunderstanding me. When you cancel your importation permit at Mexican customs, you'd be sitting in a car that says "Tsuru" on the back of it, while the paper you just handed the agent says "Sentra" on it, yet the VIN mysteriously matches. How could this be OK?

[J N Winkler]

Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you're misunderstanding me. When you cancel your importation permit at Mexican customs, you'd be sitting in a car that says "Tsuru" on the back of it, while the paper you just handed the agent says "Sentra" on it, yet the VIN mysteriously matches. How could this be OK?

The car would not actually say "Tsuru" on the back because the badge as well as the VIN labeling would be swapped in from the 1993 Sentra.

The real obstacle to this type of fraud is Customs inspection of VIN-marked parts on the US side.  Dealing with those is far less straightforward than simply swapping out plates and labels.  Also, we are assuming that a car manufactured in Mexico in 2016 will have at least the emissions control equipment that was required in the US in 1993, or at any rate has no major components obviously missing.  I don't think this can be taken for granted.  With all the smog in the Valle de Mexico the Mexican government has an incentive to regulate, but there is still a lag and I don't know exactly how large it is.

[kphoger]

I still think the largest obstacle of all would be finding a Mexican who has a desirable, legal, registered vehicle, who is for some reason willing to trade it for your tampered-with, illegally imported vehicle that you're for some reason eager to part with.

Vehicle importation laws in Mexico are designed to protect the car manufacturing industry there, stemming the flow of well-cared-for used cars coming into the country to compete for buyers' pesos against brand-new Mexican-produced ones. The people who could benefit the most from less stringent regulations are the working poor, and it is for their sake that organizations of pseudo-thugs exist to issue phony license plates for chocolates (illegally imported cars with no Mexican registration) and bully the police into not impounding them. The people in Mexico who are willing to tag their car through such channels are not the type who currently own a car that anyone in their right mind would go to all this trouble to import back into the United States. Rather, they are the ones who cannot afford anything except an illegal junker on its last legs.

[J N Winkler]

I don't think that is the scenario under discussion, which is essentially to "steal" the identity of a 1993 Sentra (North American spec) and apply it to a 2016 Tsuru (Mexican spec) with the object of driving it primarily in North America.  Probably the safest thing to do with the 1993 Sentra once its identifying marks were transferred to the Tsuru would be to run it through a crusher on the quiet.  The more complicated part of the transaction, I think, is to get the Tsuru off the Mexicans' books somehow.

[lordsutch]

You could probably get away with outright ditching your Sentra somewhere in the border zone after you stripped off everything you were going to put on the Tsuru. I'd imagine there's a bribe that would magically turn your Sentra into an "unfortunately totaled" Tsuru in some junkyard in Matamoros or Juarez. For that matter, just let someone steal it - it'd probably get parted out to fix more Tsurus.

At the other end of the deal the Mexican authorities will gladly let Mexicans buy new Tsurus in the border zone. Give your straw buyer a 10% finders fee and I doubt anyone south of the Rio Grande would care.

However... I'm 99.8% sure this entire charade would fall apart somewhere between the border and the inland United States, since you're going to have to roll through two border patrol checkpoints in your suspiciously new-looking "1993 Sentra" that looks different from the 1993 Sentra you drove south. (They also record every vehicle border-bound at these checkpoints.)

All that said, I think you could probably get a reliable mid-2000s used Sentra for cheap enough that going through this exercise in chicanery would be rather pointless except for the mild thrill of putting one over on Uncle Sam.

[US 41]

You could probably get away with outright ditching your Sentra somewhere in the border zone after you stripped off everything you were going to put on the Tsuru. I'd imagine there's a bribe that would magically turn your Sentra into an "unfortunately totaled" Tsuru in some junkyard in Matamoros or Juarez. For that matter, just let someone steal it - it'd probably get parted out to fix more Tsurus.

At the other end of the deal the Mexican authorities will gladly let Mexicans buy new Tsurus in the border zone. Give your straw buyer a 10% finders fee and I doubt anyone south of the Rio Grande would care.

However... I'm 99.8% sure this entire charade would fall apart somewhere between the border and the inland United States, since you're going to have to roll through two border patrol checkpoints in your suspiciously new-looking "1993 Sentra" that looks different from the 1993 Sentra you drove south. (They also record every vehicle border-bound at these checkpoints.)

All that said, I think you could probably get a reliable mid-2000s used Sentra for cheap enough that going through this exercise in chicanery would be rather pointless except for the mild thrill of putting one over on Uncle Sam.

The secondary customs checkpoints are easy to avoid. I'm pretty sure they just put them on state highways. The easiest way to avoid them is to look on Google Maps and see where they're located and then just bypass them using county roads for a few miles.

[lordsutch]

The secondary customs checkpoints are easy to avoid. I'm pretty sure they just put them on state highways. The easiest way to avoid them is to look on Google Maps and see where they're located and then just bypass them using county roads for a few miles.

Free tip: if CBP was that easy to avoid, people wouldn't pay thousands of bucks to get smuggled into the U.S.

BTW, there's another fly in the ointment: you also have to export enough cash or monetary instruments to pay for the car. Better hope it's under $10k US, because if it isn't and you don't disclose it, you've just committed a felony. And if you do disclose it, they'll probably seize it as drug money.

[J N Winkler]

The border zone is not like relatively well-watered parts of the US, where you can count on at least one crossroad (typically under local jurisdiction) every mile.  Often the state highway the Border Patrol camps out on is the only improved road for miles in either direction.

The $10,000 reporting requirement is not a huge obstacle since the purchase price of a Tsuru is less than that and most sundry expenses can be met by using a credit card as a cash pipeline across the border.  But a VIN mismatch is definitely fatal.  We also haven't looked closely at whether a 2016 Tsuru is an exact match to a 1993 Sentra in terms of styling.  Minor variations are possible even if a Tsuru is in fact made from the same production equipment that was used 23 years earlier for the Sentra.

[jakeroot]

We also haven't looked closely at whether a 2016 Tsuru is an exact match to a 1993 Sentra in terms of styling.  Minor variations are possible even if a Tsuru is in fact made from the same production equipment that was used 23 years earlier for the Sentra.

Most obvious giveaways are the different grill, different headlamps (slightly more curve in the Tsuru's), as well as no orange reflector in the bumper (required if not in the headlamps, AFAIK).

[kphoger]

I don't think that is the scenario under discussion, which is essentially to "steal" the identity of a 1993 Sentra (North American spec) and apply it to a 2016 Tsuru (Mexican spec) with the object of driving it primarily in North America.  Probably the safest thing to do with the 1993 Sentra once its identifying marks were transferred to the Tsuru would be to run it through a crusher on the quiet.  The more complicated part of the transaction, I think, is to get the Tsuru off the Mexicans' books somehow.

Well, the Tsuru has to come from somewhere.

We cannot be talking about buying a car from a dealership in México, because dealerships require you to present your residency visa at the time of purchase, and most states also require a Mexican driver's license in order to transfer ownership, plus you would need to provide your address and phone number in México for the paperwork.  You would not have any of these things.  It is not possible to purchase a car from a dealership with just a tourist card.

We also cannot be talking about simply buying a car from a private party prior to doing the VIN swap, because the paperwork requirements would be basically the same, the only real difference being that you and the seller would be doing the legwork at the government office rather than the dealer doing it for you.  Without having the title transferred from his name to yours, no seller would be willing to part with his car.

Nor can we be talking about buying from a private party after already having the VIN swap done, because no seller would be willing to watch an American drive his vehicle away with a VIN plate matching his title–payment received or not–especially a seller responsible and respectable enough to own the kind of car you're wanting to buy.

The only option I see left is a straight trade, in which case... see my original reply:

I still think the largest obstacle of all would be finding a Mexican who has a desirable, legal, registered vehicle, who is for some reason willing to trade it for your tampered-with, illegally imported vehicle that you're for some reason eager to part with.

Vehicle importation laws in Mexico are designed to protect the car manufacturing industry there, stemming the flow of well-cared-for used cars coming into the country to compete for buyers' pesos against brand-new Mexican-produced ones. The people who could benefit the most from less stringent regulations are the working poor, and it is for their sake that organizations of pseudo-thugs exist to issue phony license plates for chocolates (illegally imported cars with no Mexican registration) and bully the police into not impounding them. The people in Mexico who are willing to tag their car through such channels are not the type who currently own a car that anyone in their right mind would go to all this trouble to import back into the United States. Rather, they are the ones who cannot afford anything except an illegal junker on its last legs.

I really think people are underestimating...
(1) How much paperwork is involved in doing anything in México;
(2) The likelihood that people who buy and sell cars for a living along the border would have already discovered such a loophole;
(3) The willingness of Mexican citizens to be involved in international fraud with a stranger from another country;
(4) The stringency of checks and balances in a lucrative industry such as international car sales.

[J N Winkler]

These formalities (on the Mexican side) is why LordSutch suggested upthread that the scam could be made to work by having a straw purchaser buy the Tsuru, ostensibly for driving within Mexico.  Depending on how the Mexicans handle vehicle thefts, it could be reported stolen once the VIN swap is done.  This leaves VIN-marked parts and trim/equipment mismatches as the main potential stumbling blocks north of the border.

In regard to the four points raised:  (1) Yes, Mexico is infamous for it taking three weeks to open a bank account, and it is harder for a gringo to develop the detailed knowledge of admin procedure required to hack it; (2) the financial payoff is slim once the hassle factor is taken into account; (3) narcotraficantes exist, though the problem of finding reliable partners for a criminal enterprise is universal; and (4) one test of the success of such checks and balances is whether they alter the balance of comparative advantage in favor of the legal option.

[kphoger]

Just so we're clear, this kind of endeavor would involve committing state and federal crimes in two nations; hiring people in a country not your own to engage in criminal activity; risk of property seizure, fines, jail time, and deportation; and probably some things I'm forgetting. If leaving an unsalable vehicle in Mexico, it also indirectly aids organized crime by giving someone a reason to pay an organization like ONAPPAFA to "protect" your car that they now own from "unfairly" being impounded for having no valid registration.

The clear answer to the original question on this thread is NO. It is not legal to do this. It is very illegal in several ways. As we have shown by now, it would also be very difficult to pull off, require knowledge and the cooperation of shady enterprises and individuals in México, risk future registration problems in the USA, and present a serious ethical dilemma.

If there were a way to do this in anything resembling a legitimate manner, then people would already be making a living at it. There are people who make a living out of importing and exporting cars across the Mexican border, and this is something that is simply not done.

[lordsutch]

I agree; while it's a fun little thought experiment at the level of "how much of a computer's components can I replace before Microsoft makes me buy a new Windows license," with the added frisson of involving a half-dozen law enforcement agencies, bribery, Nissan Mexico, and grand theft auto, doing this would be colossally boneheaded even if you thought you'd covered all the bases.

The best you can do is to lobby Congress to harmonize FMVSS with the ECE/UN standards, perhaps via TTIP. But by that point I'd imagine Mexican cars will probably be much closer in safety and emission requirements to American ones (there's a reason they're discontinuing the Tsuru, after all, and it's not because Nissan wouldn't be happy to keep selling them to Mexican buyers if they could).

[J N Winkler]

I don't think anyone in this thread has claimed that the basic VIN swap strategy under discussion, which was originally offered as a Gedankenexperiment, is, could be, or should be legal.  I think we are all safe from allegations of being involved in criminally facilitative speech.

This said, the OP does raise an interesting point about the price differential between the US and Mexico.  It is easy to blame that on higher regulatory overhead on this side of the border, and while that is certainly a factor, it is worth asking whether cars in the US have become relatively less affordable in the decades that highly similar cars (bar differences in equipment such as variable venturi carburetors in Mexico at a time throttle-body fuel injection was being used in the US) have been available on either side of the border.

It's also worth looking more closely at the question of whether lower prices in developing and medium-income countries are made possible by the use of production equipment that has been amortized in affluent countries.  This may be true for some models (e.g. Nissan Sentra/Tsuru, Volkswagen Beetle, various iterations of the Toyota Mark II/Cressida), but not for others that are being produced simultaneously for the US and Mexican markets.

[lordsutch]

Like a lot of manufactured consumer goods like books, DVDs, and household appliances, I'd imagine cars sell for about the marginal cost of production in the developing world while being a little above the average cost of production in the developed world (excluding VAT/sales/import taxes). My Altima subsidized some guy in Mexico City's Tsuru; I paid $20 for a Blu-ray of the latest Star Wars because Disney had to dump it in Asia for $2 to compete with bootlegs.

Pharma is the extreme case, since the US is basically the only price-unregulated developed market, so the US consumer pays (directly or indirectly) well over the average cost of production to subsidize the production at marginal or somewhat-over-marginal cost for developing and price-capped markets.

[Avalanchez71]

Regulations in Third World counties are not what they are in United States.

[kphoger]

Regulations in Third World counties are not what they are in United States.

I'm not sure exactly what this is in reply to. There have already been several posts about how México has less stringent safety and emissions standards than the United States.

I'm also interested to see you apply the term "third world" to México. Historically speaking, México was a third-world nation because it was a neutral party during the Cold War. But, then, so were France and Sweden, yet nobody calls those places "third-world countries." I must assume, then, you mean that México is not a developed nation. Yet it ranks 74th in the world on the Human Development Index, above Brazil and China and Thailand. The UN categorizes México's level of human development as "high."

[vdeane]

France was a member of NATO since it was founded in 1949.  I'd hardly call that "neutral".