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Comment by rahimiali | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why smuggling cars is a market? You’re driving the cars on the street after you’ve smuggled it in, so wouldn’t the police just take it from you minutes into your first drive ? I also don’t imagine this is to avoid an import tax since it just seems to be 15%-35% [0]. Is there some other markup you avoid by smuggling in the car?

[0] https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/china-is-said-to-cut...

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A few years back my plate expired sometime in January, and though I'd ordered a replacement and put it in my glove compartment. I realized to the error my embarrassment mid-march, and changed the plates out to correct the issue. I drove my car daily for nearly three months, often past police vehicles. Never once had I been pulled over, because I drive responsibly and my municipality isn't dependent on tickets for too large a share of its budget.

Expired plates are much higher on an officer's list of things to check than figuring out whether every oddly badged or exotic looking car on the streets can be legally imported for its model year. Even if you do get caught, the fact that you could afford to illegally import a vehicle is a good sign that you can afford the legal fees and fines required to forestall any asset seizures. Especially in China, where affluence and political connections often go hand in hand (not that it isn't the case in the rest of the developed world to some extent either).

Where do you live? I’m pretty sure in Australia your registration is checked automatically whenever you drive past a police car, which are all equipped with cameras.

Is the ticketing automated? In my (NZ) experience, you don’t get pulled over and they leave that crap to parking wardens, who do it with pleasure.

When I walk through car parks I notice plenty of cars with expired registration.

In Australia it is state based. In South Australia some fixed cameras will automatically issue tickets (still in pain from a $600 fine I got once).

Not sure about the mobile police ones.

United States. The vehicle had a dealer plate on it (paper, handwritten)

I have seen numerous cars driving around with months long expired tabs. Right now it isn't being heavily enforced, and these tickets are quite hefty, often several hundred dollars, and are not considered a moving violation. (Seattle, WA, USA)

Not sure about WA, but over here in OH we have a covid extension - if your registration expires between March 2020 and April 2021 you have until July 2021 to renew. So I've been driving a vehicle with an expired temp tag from November.

Automated plate readers and live queries to the DMV/Registry are much more prevalent in just the last few years.

Smuggling luxury cars is a big thing in Thailand. There is a 200% tax to import them. There are busts reported in the news now and then. Sometimes it's a shipment of "used" car parts which is really a container of disassembled super cars shipped in to be reassembled and sold. Sometimes it is cars imported by alleged students who were studying overseas and can bring back the cars they were driving for only a 30% import tax.

The police aren't much use for enforcing laws in Thailand, especially against the rich kids.

The most egregious case of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wichian_Klanprasert

TL;DR: Red Bull heir kills a cop with speeding Ferrari and runs from scene. Heir mysteriously avoids all charges and summons with increasingly farcical excuses on both sides, until all charges are mysteriously dropped 10 years later.

Yeah, that's a good example of how the rich can get away with anything in Thailand. In most places if you kill a cop the cops make sure you get what's coming to you. But here even the cops can't get justice for other cops if the perp is the brat son of the ultra rich.

The police in smuggling destinations are corrupt, so once you have the car into the country you can just pay off the police to ignore it. But getting through the border is harder and would involve much larger bribes.

To avoid paying taxes and customs on the car, which can add up to quite a bit.

If the taxes are high enough to fund the development & operation of military-like boats, I think the problem isn't the smuggling but a greedy government. They can destroy this market overnight by just making the taxes more reasonable, and maybe even end up ahead if it means they no longer have to spend money on enforcement.

>greedy government ...just making the taxes more reasonable

Like Australia? Look a their bustling car manufacturing sector and all the jobs it created, or US and their electronics manufacturing might. Why make reasonable taxes when you can use protectionism to bootstrap whole industry? Sprinkle some mandatory 49-51% co ownership and you have a real winner on your hands.

Australia doesn’t have much of a car industry

There's a big enough market for stolen cars, that the tax level probably wouldn't make a difference.

Because cops don't really have so much free time that they can just suddenly detect a smuggled car and pull it over. Unless the cop car has plate readers or a read BOLO match the smuggled car's description, they can't really know anything about the car as long as all of the other gov't issued stickers are up to date.

Could it be that rich persons are largely ignored by the police? What lowly officer would risk their career to embarrass a wealthy powerful person?

There's a big market in cars stolen abroad. Because they're not legitimate at all, they have to be smuggled in.

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