Japanese Imports & Used Cars Direct, Import Direct from Japanese Auctions

Dear customers, thanks for your interest in Auto Trader Imports and in buying from the Japansese car auctions.

Buying direct from auction gives you an amazing range of cars to choose from and usually works out to be the most economical way of buying your new car!

We are getting a lot of inquiries from first time auction buyers recently and there seems to be a little confusion regarding the different prices involved.

I would like to try to clear this up here.

First thing - Japanese car auctions are not like Yahoo or eBay auctions where the item is available to be bid on for a week or three days or anything like that. A Japanese car auction lasts about 30 seconds. Then the auction is over and the car is either sold or unsold.

Now secondly, there are some prices that you can see through our auction link. There are three figures that you need to be aware of:

1. Start price – auction cars have a start price, it could be Y0, Y10,000, Y100,000 or any other number. This is just the start price for the auction that the owner has decided on. Its has no bearing on the final sale price. The car will not sell for this price!!

2. Reserve price – this is the price that the owner has agreed to sell the car for. This price isn’t know until the auction is running.

3. Sold price – this is the highest bid above the owners reserve. This is the final sale price.

As an example – there is a 2001 Mitsubishi Lancer EVO VI at auction with a start price of Y50,000.

The owner has set a reserve of Y900,000

The final bid was Y1,120,000

The person who bid Y1,120,000 is now the owner of the car.

If the final bid had been Y850,000 then the car would have been unsold as it didn’t meet the owners reserve price.

If you had bid Y50,000 (ie the start price) then you would not have been successful in winning this auction.

Please have a look at the live auctions for yourself here - http://www.autotraderimports.com/auction and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions about the auction process.