Importing a car to Switzerland from Germany, I
Published on Aug 04, 2009 12:13 by Baldvin
Detailed procedure of bringing a 2005 Chrysler Grand Voyager from Germany to Zürich, Switzerland.
Why, and what type?
We wanted a Chrysler Grand Voyager Limited, with Stow and Go (so not older than 2005). In Switzerland, the Limited model is available just since 2008,which is too expensive. In the US there is a large market of family minivans, I could have bought one for ~8-10k dollars, but we were afraid of it taking too much hassle to get it here.
I was also a bit afraid of the consumption of the 3.8 or 4.0 liters gasoline motor. I am not sure if that concern was substantial or not though.
Finally we chose one from http://mobile.de. It was from Singen, close to the Swiss-German border, and not that very expensive either.
The buy
It went pretty easily. Test drive. The breaks weren't so good, as the car was not used for a while. The seller was a very small (1 man) car dealer. He agreed to change the breaks and tires within the given price --- it was possible to even bargain a bit.
The seller offered to do the paperwork for the customs plate and the liability insurance. There was an option to chose 1 months and 3 months for those temporary papers, we chose 3 months, but I'd choose 1 month if I did it again.
A week later I went back and payed for the car and the following extra expenses:
Zulassungsgebühren: €49.50
Insurance for the customs plate: €350.00
Customs plate: €26.50
Total for import administration: €426.00
We payed for the car including VAT (MWST in Deutch),
Nitpicking: …and was informed that we get that back after we registered the car in Switzerland.
Further nitp…The package
So we were crossing the border with
1. the car
2. a so called "COC" paper (certificate of CO2 emission, very important if you bring in a car that wasn't sold in Switzerland in that time in that very exact model!)
3. the bill (keep it, you'll need it!)
4. the insurance papers
5. the green paper with the tiny little details of the car (I don't know how it is called right now, I'll fill it in later. You know, the paper with the numbers of the motor, the chassis, the weight of the car, etc).
We weren't stopped at the border at all (and so we didn't stop). So there was no hassle at the border at all.
Customs in Zürich
As we had papers for the car for 3 months, we didn't really hurry with it. After 2.5 months I looked up the office, here are its parameters:
Zollverwaltung EZV
Freilagerstrasse 47,8043 Zürich
044 497 88 00
Dienststellenverzeichnis
I went there for 7:50 in the morning. There was a few very kind administrators, no customers other then me.
They spoke English well.
They informed me that either I can pay custom taxes now, or I can postpone it until two years after me entering Switzerland (2 years from the date on my Auslanderausweis). This applies for my case too, where I didn't bring the car from my original country.
If I choose that, I get some special papers, and after the 2 years, the current value of the car is calculated using some book called "Eurotax", or similar, and I need to pay tax based on that value.
However, there's a catch: if you buy the car much cheaper than the value in that book, you can end up paying more. What's worse is that the exact model of our car isn't in that book for Switzerland for before 2008,so they told they'd use the earliest value present in the book, which would be way more than the real value of the car. So I chose not to use this extra option, but rather pay the customs taxes right away.
The procedure from there was nice and fast. You actually need to bring the car too, not just the papers, as they check some numbers on it if they match the papers.
The taxes I payed,
paidusing the German words for the items from the bill:1. Zollabgaben: CHF 15 per 100kg of empty weight
2. Automobilsteuer: 4% of netto price
3. Andere gebühren:CHF 44
4. Andere gebühren:CHF 20
There's a separate bill for VAT: you pay 7.6% VAT on the sum of the netto price of the car plus the value of the previous bill.
The customs office costed around CHF 2600, and the only thing I got was a nice and shiny A4 paper, with which I can go to the Strassenverkehersamt to "Immatrikulate" the car. So far, so good. They gave a leaflet explaining everything, we'll see soon.
