Cars from the USA in Kraków — you bid, we bring it in

Cars from the USA in Kraków — what is worth knowing
 

Kraków, cars from the USA and the question that always comes first: what will this actually cost. The figure has three parts — the lot price, the payments at the border and the final leg of the journey — and none of them is a secret. US cars in Kraków are bought differently than they were five years ago: you are not asking anyone to act for you blind, because the car's history and the full amount are visible before anyone raises the price. A car from America in Kraków also has a purely practical advantage — models like these rarely turn up on the local second-hand market. Below: the road from the States to Kraków, how bidding actually works, and what genuinely fits each budget.

What importing cars from the USA to Kraków looks like
 

Bringing a car from the USA to Kraków is five legs, and only the last one is local. First the won lot travels by truck from the auction yard to one of the four ports our shipments leave from: Newark in New Jersey, Savannah in Georgia, Houston in Texas or Los Angeles in California. Which one depends on the state the car was standing in — the closer to the port, the shorter and cheaper this leg. Then a container or a ro-ro vessel: the Atlantic crossing takes four to six weeks. All our shipments enter the EU through Klaipėda in Lithuania — that is where the car comes off the ship and where customs clearance begins, with duty, excise and VAT charged. Only at the end comes the leg you care about most: Klaipėda to Kraków by truck, some nine hundred kilometres, usually within two or three days of customs releasing the car. The whole import of a car from the USA to Kraków normally fits into six to ten weeks from the winning bid. The longest and least predictable part is the crossing; the rest of the route keeps to schedule.

Cars from the USA — Copart and IAAI auctions from the inside
 

The search usually starts with opening several US car listing sites at once: middlemen's ads, forums, groups. Each shows a different slice of the market at a different price, because each adds its own margin. An auction catalogue shows the source — the very lots standing on Copart and IAAI yards right now, with the final figure calculated for Kraków. If you have been searching sites with cars from the USA so far, you will see the difference immediately: here the price is not a starting price but the sum you actually pay.

Copart and IAAI are the two American auction houses that most damaged, ex-lease and repossessed cars in the States pass through. Most of what arrives there was bought out by insurers — which is why every lot carries a damage description written by an assessor, not by a seller. US car auctions do not work like classified ads: a lot has a set closing time and there is nobody to haggle with. You name your maximum, the system bids up to that ceiling on your behalf and stops. Auctions in the USA themselves are open only to companies holding an American licence — that is state law, not our rule. So you bid through an agent who holds one, but you set the limit yourself and you see what the lot actually sold for. Before you click „bid”, look at three things: the title type (clean, salvage, rebuilt), the state the car is standing in — that drives the cost of the run to the port — and the note on whether the car starts. Those three fields explain most of the price difference between otherwise similar lots.

Which cars from the USA under 50,000 people buy most often
 

Up to fifty thousand zloty — counting duty, excise, VAT and delivery — you are usually looking at SUVs and crossovers from 2016–2019: Jeep Cherokee, Ford Edge, Toyota RAV4, Mazda CX-5, Hyundai Santa Fe. These are lightly damaged or ex-lease cars with mileage you will not find on the Polish market at that price. Cars from the USA under 30,000 are typically 2012–2015 four-cylinder sedans: Ford Fusion, Toyota Camry, Hyundai Sonata, Nissan Rogue. Below twenty thousand the maths usually stops working, and we say so plainly: freight, clearance and the truck cost the same for a cheap car as for an expensive one, so on a lot worth a few thousand dollars they can eat a third of the price. At that budget a Kraków car market will serve you better — and we will tell you that straight away.