Selling abroad: export, plates, liability

Little changes about the contract itself: you may sell a car to anyone, and the contract remains one between two private individuals. What changes are three practical points — how the car leaves, which papers the buyer needs at home, and when and how your registration ends.

Then there is a fourth that only shows up when it goes wrong: enforcing a claim across borders is laborious. A dispute with a buyer from your own neighbourhood is unpleasant; a dispute with one in another country is practically hopeless unless the sum is large. So payment and documentation matter even more here than usual.

The biggest difference, though, is not between “home” and “abroad” but between “inside the EU single market” and “across a customs border”. A sale from Germany to Austria works differently from a sale from Switzerland to Germany, and the difference is the customs declaration.

If you sell from one EU member state to a buyer in another, there is no customs declaration and no export in the customs sense. The car is moved, not exported. In practice: no customs office, no export accompanying document, no commodity code — only a contract, the papers and the question of how the car travels.

For tax, a private sale stays a private sale: you show no VAT and pay none, because you are not a trader. The buyer pays no acquisition tax at home either, as long as the car counts as used — he only pays the fees and charges of registering it.

The exception is called a “new means of transport”, and it is narrower than everyday usage suggests: the single market defines it by two thresholds, the car's age and its mileage. Below both, the acquisition is taxed in the country of destination, even in a private-to-private sale. Which thresholds apply in a given case is set out by the Federal Central Tax Office or the tax administration of the destination country.

Switzerland is not part of the EU customs territory. A car sold from there into an EU state is exported and imported at the other end — with a declaration on both sides. On the Swiss side the Federal Office for Customs and Border Security is responsible, on the other the customs administration of the country of import.

For you as the seller that is less work than it sounds, because the cost of importing falls on the buyer, not on you: import duties, import VAT and any registration charges are assessed in the destination country on the vehicle's value and, depending on the country, additionally on displacement, weight or CO₂ output. The current rates are published by the relevant customs and tax administrations, and they change — which is why no figure appears here.

What you can contribute is the document that sum rests on: a clean contract with price, date, vehicle identification number and both addresses. A handwritten note without a chassis number is awkward for the destination customs office, and the follow-up questions land with the buyer, who then brings them to you.

Registering abroad rarely fails because of the car and often because of a missing document. The following are the papers registration authorities ask for — and which you either have or can obtain with a little lead time.

Settle the paperwork question before he travels, not at handover. Ordering a replacement certificate of conformity from the manufacturer takes something on the order of weeks, and a buyer who has driven three hundred kilometres only to find the decisive sheet missing either walks away or reopens the price.

There are three routes, and the buyer should have settled all of them before handover. On a trailer is the simplest: no registration, no insurance question, no argument. It costs the buyer money and you nothing.

The second route is an export plate. In Germany the registration office issues one for a limited period against proof of insurance for that period; in Switzerland customs plates serve a comparable purpose. Both come with conditions, and both must be applied for by the buyer — normally in person and with the vehicle papers to hand.

The third route is the riskiest: the buyer drives off on your plates and promises to send them back. This happens often, and it often goes wrong. As long as the plates are in your name, so are the premium, the charge and every offence — and from another country you will get back neither the plates nor the money.

It ends with deregistration, not with handover. That is a sentence worth reading twice when selling abroad, because unlike in a domestic sale the buyer does not re-register with your authority at all — he registers the car in his own country, and your authority may never hear of it.

That makes a cross-border sale the case where deregistering before handover almost always pays. You hand back the plates, the buyer arranges a trailer or export plates, and the moment he drives away the car has nothing more to do with you.

If you exceptionally hand it over registered, then with a notice of sale to the registration office, with your insurer informed the same day, and with a copy of the buyer's ID in your hand. In Germany the notice of sale is what takes your name out of the file; in Switzerland the route is handing the plates back.

The rules are the same as at home, only the time pressure is greater, because the buyer has travelled and wants to get back. That is exactly what many attempted frauds exploit: distance generates reasons why something cannot happen at once.

In practice: a payment within the European payments area runs in euro as an ordinary or an instant transfer, and the instant transfer is what makes a Saturday-afternoon handover possible at all. Payments from non-euro countries take longer and cost fees; anyone announcing one should have initiated it before the appointment, not during it.

And as everywhere, one sentence carries the rest: keys and papers only once the full amount is irrevocably in your account, checked in your own app. Carvexia processes no payments and holds no money in escrow — between you and a buyer from another country there is nobody to step in.

Write the contract in a language both of you command, and if that is not the same one, in a bilingual version side by side. A contract one side never read because they could not read it is the weakest point in any dispute — and it will reliably be raised.

In substance, three points join the usual ones: the buyer's full foreign address with ID number, a statement of how the car leaves the country, and the buyer's express undertaking to register it at home and send you proof. The last point costs you a sentence and can save you months.

Include the warranty exclusion as in any other private sale, with its two familiar limits: it carries the unknown, not the concealed, and it does not help against qualities you promised. Which law applies to a cross-border contract can be contested — another reason to structure the deal so that nothing is left to settle after handover.