Getmuddy website

Temporary Export of a Vehicle
Driving in Europe is a doddle. You stick your car on a ferry or the cahnnel tunnel, and off you go. Your insurace will provide you with the basic cover, your car should be legal, i.e. taxed and MOT'd, and there isn't too much to worry about. But when you intend to take it somewhere a bit farther afield, how do things change? Well according to those tight-arsed sods at DVLA, even if your car is out of Europe, it still has to be taxed and MOT'd. Officially this means you can't SORN your car, cash the tax in and go.
If you are temporarily exporting for less than 12 months then you don't need to notify DVLA.

Unlike many other countries, the USA does not require you to have a Carnet du passage (an insurance document guarenteeing that you intend to take the vehicle out of the country again). But you will need to complete form from NHTSA
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/import/TempInfo.html

Shipping
Having made a few phone calls to various companies and wanging a few emails out, I was beginning to thing that this whole shipping milarky was a right pain in the bum! Everywhere I contacted who was able to give us a quote said that shipping would be from Felixstowe, not from Southampton where we live (which has a massive container port!!)...

We ruled out RORO - (Roll on Roll off) pretty early in our investigations. This is because the vehicle has to be empty, i.e. no personal effects. For us, this was a complete no-no as we need to send all our gear loaded in the back. We have heard of people turning up at the port and the port authorities turning a blind eye, but to be honest, we are not willing to take the risk of them turning round and saying we have to unload it before they ship, or refusing to ship altogether. If this happened then we'd potentially loose a week, maybe 2 from our holiday. If we just wanted to send an empty vehicle, this would have been fine. So despite Ro-Ro being cheaper, we opted to go the container route.

But then we had to decide what type of container. They come in 3 flavours, 20ft, 40ft and 40ft high cube. A standard 20ft and 40ft container has an opening that is about 7cm shorter than a Camel Trophy 110.

Find a shipping agent and make them your best friend! I finally settled on Kingstown shipping Ltd who specialise in shipping vehicles between the US and UK (although UK to US seems to be a bit of a rarity!) and had been recommended by 2 separate people on the LR4x4 forum. I spoke to Steve who provided all the information I needed to know. We started by working out that Charlie won't fit in a 20ft container! The doorway is 2.27m tall. Charlie is currently 2.34m tall unloaded. So we needed to loose 7cm in height somehow! We discussed various options to reduce the height of Charlie Camel, ratchet straps around the axle and chassis, letting tyres down and hoped that fully loaded we may be able to shave 2 or 3 cm off the height. The remaining 4 or 5 cm could be lost by deflating the rear tyres. Once Charlie is loaded into the container, he would have a whopping 11cm of clearence!!! Because of this we would have to make sure that he was well tied down in the container with ratchet straps galore! However, after talking to Steve, he got us a quote for a 40ft Hi-Cibe container. With the cost difference being so small it really was a no-brainer... 40ft hi-cube container it was! No messing with deflated tyres and ratchet straps, just drive straight in there.

Then we moved onto departure and destination ports. Felixstowe is the UK's largest container port and is cheaper, that is why everybody quotes from there rather than Southampton. This isn't really too much of a problem as my Dad lives in Colchester which is just down the road, so it's a good excuse to drop in and have a beer with him... cheers Dad!

So then destination port had to be decided on. A few people I'd asked on the Landy forums had said to avoid New York. Why? Because apparently customs there are jobsworths and can be a little firmer than at other ports, so on Steves suggestion, Baltimore will now be the port of arrival.

US Customs should hopefully not be too much of a problem. There is a form to fill in to temporarily import a vehicle for anything up to 12 months. Anything more than that and the vehicle needs to be registered and approved by the US DOT. A Land Rover Defender will not meet current US safety laws, so it cannot be imported unless it is over 15 years of age. Obviously this doesn't apply to a NAS90. In our case we also had to find a US shipping agent to arrange the unloading and customs clearence of our container. Dartrans are providing that service.

On Tuesday 3rd July, we delivered Charlie Camel to Felixstowe and loaded him into his container. The container was delivered to the quayside that day ready fro loading onto the MSC Christina. On Tuesday 10th at 2300hrs, the vessel set sail!
Loading Charlie into container

Our current problem lies with getting the container unloaded. It appears that as we have loaded the vehicle with spares, and our "personnal effects" this is causing a bit of a problem.

To be honest, if I were to do this again, I'd try to find a company that could handle the whole job, ie loading in the UK, unloading and customs clearence in the destination country as trying to get the 2 companies to talk to each other has been a major challenge.