Should the Import Law Still Exist, or Should it be Repealed?

In 1988, The Imported Vehicle Safety Compliance Act was made to prevent people from importing cars not originally sold in the U.S. The law pretty much means that any car that isn’t twenty-five years or older, cannot be brought into the United States. Right now that’s cars made after the year 1995. Cars after 1995 are the R34 Nissan GTR, and the Nissan Silvia S15.

 The reason this law was made was somewhat inaccurate compared to what the main argument was.  The main reason that caused the law and that is believed by most people, is because American car manufacturers are not able to fit the same modifications to their cars compared to the Euro counterparts. One major car manufacturer was Mercedes Benz.. Mercedes in Europe was selling more cars to Americans than the US branch trying to sell the cars to their own country! The policy is currently on change.org where people aim to repeal the law that prevents cars from entering the country. People have attempted to import cars into the U.S.  One example of this is a man from Mississippi who is currently facing 20 years in jail as well as a $250,000 fine for importing a Silvia that won’t be street legal until 2024. The worst part, the car risks being crushed for no one else to drive. This doesn’t help the supply of Silvia’s in which there are only around 40,000. Yet there are upwards of millions of people who one day want to own this car, me being one of them. Now, there is a way to make it street legal before it’s actually 25. Although, it does cost a ton of cars and money.

In order to make a car street legal, it needs to pass through crash testing. This as you may imagine, requires hundreds of cars to be purposely crashed which can get costly in the short term and even more in the long term. Sure it might be legalized if it passes, but the stock of the already rare cars will get even more scarce and begin to cost more than normal. This is why if given the choice, most people would rather just wait out the twenty-five years and not have to worry about crash tests. The Import and Customs Law handbook provides everything that a vehicle requires to be street legal -from the taillights to the front bumper that may have to be switched for “safety reasons”. I put that in quotes because when anyone imports a car and puts it through the list they almost immediately get rid of the safer parts. They then swap them with the authentic parts from wherever the car is from. Most of the time Japanese or Jdm which stands for Japanese domestic market, cars from this demographic are mainly right-hand drive.  This may be a bit confusing to Americans, as well as the manual transmission that is very common across Europe and Japan but is now very uncommon in America where manual transmission cars only take up 3.5 percent of cars sold. The easiest state to import a car from overseas is Maine and Alabama. The hardest states are definitely California and Hawaii. The main reason California is one of if not the worst states to import a car is because of their very strict regulations that need to either be applied or installed into the car in order to make it street legal.

In the end, most people consider the law to a pointless time waster and I’m with them. At this time my opinion is that the law should be repealed due to its pointlessness, not entirely as the safety modification which should be applied to cars that are made for the European and Japanese market, but the twenty-five year wait that is required in order to even have the privilege to import one of these cars.