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> I heard an interesting story about right hand drive T34's today at the VW > show. Apparently all of the RHD T34s were shipped to England, and the > English distributors were in charge of sending them to RHD countries around > the world. In the middle of this, there was a change in the British tax on > new cars. Previously tax was charged on a car when it was sold, then they > changed it (I think it was late 60's) so that tax was charged when a car > entered the country. Because of this, a lot of the cars were left on the > docks in France (where they were dispatched for England) until they were > actually sold, some of them for up to two years. This meant that even when > new a lot of them required rust repairs at dealers, because of the exposure > to salt water. This made RHD T34's very rare indeed as the ones that did > survive still rusted badly later from the effects of the salt water. > Never heard of that, Ben! It was an independent company that handled VW car sales in the UK. There were two taxes, import duty and purchase tax. The vehicle attracted the import duty then when sold the purchase tax was payable, so you also paid tax on the duty! I don't know when the duty was payable - it could have changed to the time of importation I suppose. There was a change in the rate of purchase tax around 1960; my father bought a '59 model Beetle (Fjord blue of course, Brian!) in September 1958, and it cost 716GBP, but a couple of years later he could buy a new one for about 680GBP, as the tax had been cut. There was a time in the '60s when Sterling was in some sort of crisis, and the amount of foreign money you could take out of the country for a holiday was severely limited, to 50GBP I think. Mind you, that would have been $150 then, and was worth several times what it is now! You had to have the amount recorded in your passport! Maybe it was around then. I remember that our 1500S Variant was almost £1,000 new in 1964 (about $2,400). I'd guess they would have been about $1,600 in the USA if you could have bought one. In 1966 there was a lot of talk about Britain joining the common market (European Economic Community) and European cars would have become much cheaper (they said!) as they had import tax on them, which would have been removed. I would guess there could be truth in the story you heard. I was about to buy my first car second-hand , and one guy offered me an Oval he was repairing before he had finished it, in case the value suddenly dropped and left him working for no profit! I didn't buy it, but ended up with a much better Garnet red '59 Beetle. Sadly, imported cars have remained over-priced due to the profiteering of the makers and sellers, though recent legal action has reduced them a bit. VW were fined something like 40 million dollars for trying to stop Italians buying their VWs from over the border in the Eastern bloc. Dave. UK VW Type 3 & 4 Club http://www.hallvw.clara.co.uk/ ------ ------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <type3-off@vwtype3.org> For more help, see http://vwtype3.org/list/