I bought an imported Ford Puma many years ago. People at work scoffed saying there would be no warranty, no one would service it, no one would buy it etc etc.

When it went in for its first service at the local Ford dealer I explained it was a grey import but he appeared unconcerned. I took the servive book which was all in German and stamped by the dealer who did the PDI (think they were near Hamburg). One fault needed sorting, the boot release button on the remote did not work.

Collected car later that day. Paid price as quoted (same as UK car), key reprogrammed to sort boot release and they even replaced the German service book with an English one.

When I came to sell the car almost 6 trouble free years later not a single dealer was bothered it was an import. They all offered pretty much the same price based on the usual trade guides. One dealer (Honda) was quite upfront about it being an import, basically he would take anything except a Renault in PX.

So the only difference between a UK car and the import was the £3500 I saved when I bought it.

My current Mazda3 was an EU import (RHD), originally that went to Cyprus and ended up on Motorpoint's books as many unsold EU RHD cars do (recently they've had many delivery miles VW Golfs with EU specs on sale, actually with a higher spec than the UK standard models [GTs with climate control instead of the standard A/C]).

Mine was a 1.6 TS2 saloon, with metalic paint, which had only a radio instead of the uk version's single-slot CD/radio (fortunately Motorpoint wrongly stated it had a CD player so I was refunded the price to install one at my local dealership), and front fog lamps in lieu of the traction and stability control systems (actually quite lucky to not have them, as these were systems which experienced problems [also across many cars of various makes using the same parts]). Other than them changing over the speedo to read mph, the car is exactly the same as the UK models in all other respects. No problems with servicing at dealerships and has (touch wood) been nearly faultless over ten years.

I suppose mine was a 'TS1.75', though I paid only £10,300 (actually less if the refund was taken into account) for a brand new car when the TS2 model's list price was of the order of the low-mid £14ks and even the lower spec TS was about £13-13.5k. Even if mine was worth less than the 'standard' UK spec model, the optional extras I added (I added a Mazda CD player [with MP3 capability], cassette player, boot liner, mud flaps and matching floor mats and still had a £3.5k saving to bank!) due to the great deal I'd got (the brokers' best price on a new UK-spec TS [not TS2] was £11.4k), so any reduction in value was more than negated by the extra kit I added and the huge saving (25%+) I was lucky enough to get over UK-sourced cars.

Any car designed to be sold anywhere in the EU (one of the few decent benefits of being a member) means that they must have transferable waranties across all the EU nations - I suspect only if the spec differs substantially or on an item of significance does it really impact on residual values to the owner, as with mine, an 'import' of this kind often attracts a decent discount over UK-sourced variants and thus just gets passed down the chain of owners over the years, probably more so when its newer when it matters more. With older cars like mine, condition is far more important than where the car was originally sold (as long as it has the EU CoC certificate and isn't a proper 'gery imprt' from outside the EU).

Edited by Engineer Andy on 11/05/2016 at 01:52