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From April 30th until May 8th there is a holiday period in Japan known as Golden Week. It is a series of public holidays surrounding a weekend which businesses take the opportunity to have a break.

Most auctions and shipping companies will be closed during this period.

Get Cars Japan will be staffed by a skeleton crew and we’ll be able to respond to urgent matters.

Although there may be a few scattered auctions, most will be back to full operation from May 9th.

We will do our best to keep up our fanatical customer support during the holiday period and would highly appreciate your understanding if there are delays in our response time.

Best wishes,

The Get Cars Team

Thank you to one of our Japanese car enthusiast friends for sharing this vibrant shot of his 1992 M30Z, a Tommykaira tuned Nissan Fairlady 300ZX.

Beautiful car and beautiful photography !
Happy Holidays to all !

Thank you for bearing with us during the shipping crisis.
We have some updates and perhaps promising news.

The short term news for RORO shipping is NOT good.

As an example, before COVID-19 the US dollar rate per cubic meter for shipping from Japan to Bremerhaven was $77.
As of today, the rate has climbed to an incredible $180.

We advise you to be extremely careful with your budgeting when buying vehicles at the moment.

HOWEVER, the outlook for the future is promising.

Container ocean freight has finally started to ease and currently the rates are around half of what they were at their peak last year.

If container prices continue to decrease, we anticipate a shift from RORO shipping to container shipping which will hopefully in turn lead to a decrease in RORO shipping rates.

RORO shipping lines have taken advantage of high demand since container freight became prohibitively expensive.
In short, this has damaged a lot of business for both us and our overseas partners.

There seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Let us hope the end of the tunnel is not too far away.

Thank you for your ongoing business and support.

Congratulations on another great production by a customer in the UK.
Thank you for sharing the before and after photos with us.
Awesome restoration and upgrade.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been an ongoing worldwide shipping crisis whereby RORO shipping has become difficult to secure space, and subsequently expensive with ocean freight prices approaching double what they were at the beginning of January 2020.

The main cause and trigger that led to this unfortunate situation is thought to be container shipping.

Once COVID-19 became a pandemic, container shipping from China and nearby regions continued but return shipments all but ceased.
This led to a great buildup of empty containers in Europe and North America, but more importantly a shortage of containers to ship cargo from Asia.
In turn, container ocean freight gradually increased to prices 10 times what they were in January 2020.

Due to these prohibitively high prices used car importers all over the world were forced to switch to RORO only, thus  the high prices and lack of space for RORO shipments.

Get Cars Japan is in a fortunate direct relationship with Hoegh Autoliners and other shipping companies and we have had moderate success at avoiding shipping delays compared to most exporters.
We have also been sympathetic to customers waiting times and
the increased freight prices and have heavily compensated much of the yard storage fees until now.

Some shipping yards have as little as 30 days free storage before they start charging a daily rate.
Longer free storage times are 45 days, and the longest is 60 days.

Because we have compensated storage for over 2 years now without any immediate sign of shipping space freeing up, it has become necessary to implement a policy for customers to pay for yard storage fees.

Customers can rest assured that Get Cars Japan will aim to ship all vehicles as quickly as possible, and compensate storage fees in the case a delay was avoidable.
However, from September 1st 2022 we would like all customers to budget for an extra 10,000 JPY to 15,000 JPY in their bids, to cover any storage fees for unavoidable delays that result in   storage fees charged by the shipping yards.
Please note that these yards are independent of Get Cars Japan and we have zero sway when it comes to requesting discount or leniency on these storage fees, nor do we add any extra costs to theirs.

We see our dealings with you as a partnership and therefore have the same interests.
It is our greatest hope for 2022 that this crisis will end and shipping costs and space will somewhat normalize.

GET CARS JAPAN is happy to announce we have joined Coinify, an only service that allows customers to send payments using crypto currencies.

For more information, please visit our Payment Methods page;
Payment Methods – Get Cars Japan

We have recommended Wise as a useful transfer system to many customers, but unfortunately there is currently an issue with their service. Customers in some regions have been getting an error when trying to transfer money to our account.
Wise have very poor support services in such situations. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience and are happy to recommend the following alternatives:
Revolut: Revolut – One app, all things money (personal accounts, not business). Customers report this service to be easier to use, and to have better exchange rates compared to Wise. We also personally use Revolut and find it to be an excellent service.
Forex : https://www.ukforex.co.uk/?pid=3324
PayPal: Our PayPal account is sales@getcars.jp
(Please “send to friend” if option available).

This year again, Get Cars Japan attended the Osaka Auto Messe, the largest car show in Osaka. We are happy to share with you our photos on our Facebook page:
Osaka Auto Messe 2022

Dear Customers,

A shortage of available RORO vessels to all European destinations began in February and has continued into March. We will be actively working with our partners and utilizing our close ties to shipping companies to secure any available space and move all cargo as soon as possible.
While Get Cars Japan enjoys receiving more spaces than most companies, we still struggle to secure places for all vehicles due to several shipping lines having no sailings at all, or using all of their spaces for brand new vehicles only.

Until now Get Cars has been losing a lot of money paying for dock storage on cars that we have been unable to ship quickly even though the situation is unrelated to our business operation.

For vehicles purchased from March 2022, we will be invoicing half of any additional storage fees to the customer. As always, we aim to have all vehicles shipped before the free storage period ends.
Unfortunately, there will be cases where ships are full, cancelled, or only accepting brand new vehicles and this may result in delayed shipping.
We fully appreciate your patience over the past few challenging years, and ask for continued understanding should your vehicle ship a little slower than you desire.

Kind regards,

GCJ Team

Our auction data supplier has done an excellent job restoring the auction system and we are please to announce that systems are up and running.

Notes:

1. There may be a few bugs for the first week while things are being adapted for the new server.
2. The new server does not have a security certificate yet so you need to ensure you are using http and not https. You will also see a notification “not secure” in your browser. This is nothing to worry about, and the certificate will be installed very shortly.
   
   Thank you for your patience.