This New York Dealer Can Import Almost Any Car on Earth
Raphael Orlove
If you want to import a vintage car to the United States, it’s no problem. You can call up an import shop like Inbound Motorsports and a few grand later, the 25-years-old-or-older car you bought overseas will be waiting for you at the docks. But what if you want something a little bit more modern?
If you want to import anything newer than 25 years old, you need to go through what’s called a registered importer: a shop federally licensed to work directly with the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency to ensure any new vehicle sold Stateside complies with all of our relevant safety and emissions standards. And if you want to go to a registered importer around New York City, there’s only one game in town: Autosport Designs, a few stops down the LIRR in Huntington Station, Long Island.
“We can bring over anything,” says Dawn Cames, Autosport’s general manager. “There’s nothing that we stay away from, just because it’s in another country.”
The reason why registered importers exist in the first place goes back to the 1980s, when fly-by-night importers brought over (West) German-market cars by the containerful at a perfect intersection of yuppie demand and a weak Deutschmark. But regulation at the end of the decade and the general trend towards homogenization across markets in the auto industry have largely put an end to anybody importing anything as pedestrian as a Mercedes-Benz. Given the amount of time and effort to bring anything new over, it’s no surprise that the market has moved to the high end. The very high end.
“We’ve probably had that car at our facility for a good six or seven weeks,” Cames tells me. We’re talking about the gleaming blue Lotus Evija sitting above us, sunshine looping over its carbon-fiber skin. An all-electric hypercar, it stickers at $2.4 million.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove A factory-authorized Lotus dealer, Autosport works with both the DOT and the EPA to bring over even the automaker’s most limited-edition models. “We’re in the process of it now. We’re still waiting on them to test the vehicle itself. They have all the documentation that’s required. […] But they started the process months and months… probably a year and a half ago.”
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove There are two caveats to the registered importer requirements. The first is that you can sidestep registered importers altogether if the vehicle in question is 25 years old or older. That’s a product of the “25-Year Rule,” the aforementioned 1988 amendment to our Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. The second is that the rarest and most valuable cars can make their way into the U.S. under two conditions. They still have to go through a registered importer, and they have to keep to 2,500 miles per year – basically driving to car shows or race tracks and back. This is called the “Show and Display” rule, a 1999 amendment put in place so that Bill Gates could drive his Porsche 959 around. (U.S. Customs impounded Gate’s 959 for 13 years while he and his friends lobbied for the legislation.)
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Show and Display is one of Autosport’s specialties. I can’t help but notice an Aston One-77 peeking at me from the edge of Autosport’s basement garage. It shouldn’t be here. Aston never sold the One-77 in the States, as it didn’t conform to all our automotive standards. With a limited production run of 77 cars, Aston didn’t need the American market and didn’t go through the trouble of certification. Among all the One-77s that Autosport brought over, this is owner and founder Tom Papadopoulos’ personal car. Getting it here took some ingenuity.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “I should have bought a Honda franchise,” Papadopoulos says as he strides in through the front door. His walk to his office takes him past a Mercedes SLR McLaren Roadster, a Jaguar XJ220, a Bugatti Veyron, and a 1954 Ferrari 250 GT race car, one of four lightweights ever made, two of which have survived to this day. “Price upon request” is what they say on the dashboard, but the first two of those could easily separate you from half a million dollars each; the latter two are seven-figure machines. You’re not leaving the showroom with that Ferrari for less than five million.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “We brought in the One-77s for Aston,” Papadopoulos clarifies, “I brought in a bunch of shit for Aston because we always were called upon to do what they couldn’t get done in the States because we’re still the colonies for them.” Having also brought over the V600 Le Mans and DB7 Zagato under Show and Display, Autosport Designs can act as a bridge for smaller-scale automakers to get into the American market. Papadopoulos has the light touch of a native New Yorker and explains that limited-production cars can get held up from American sales for seemingly nonsensical reasons. The One-77, according to Papadopoulos, passed all of our testing standards but was blocked because it didn’t have OBD, the onboard diagnostic standard that also gets used for identifying a car in states that use barcodes for registration. Some piggybacked software (and a couple hundred pages of documentation), and it was good to go. These hold-ups can be “like getting a bad DMV office,” as Papadopoulos puts it.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove For any of his grousing about wishing he had a Honda franchise, Papadopoulos knows this business back to front. He’s deeply involved in purchases and sales, and I watch as he discusses with a customer what vintage Porsche would be right for his kind of driving and lifestyle. And I don’t mean generally – Papadopoulos runs through a mental list, down to the serial number, knowing which 1970s RSR is real and which is a replica, which has what spec of engine, which got repainted in what year. He knows these cars, their histories, and their owners personally. Some of them he has raced against in the American Le Mans Series or Ferrari Challenge.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove These end up being long relationships, with both owners and their cars. Papadopoulos often ends up buying cars back as they shuffle around their automotive wardrobe. Autosport Designs is very much his company, trading on connections Papadopoulos has made since its founding in 1989 and before.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove In the end, vintage cars make up the lion’s share of Autosport Design’s business. There are well over a hundred cars on the premises, some eye-wateringly desirable and rare. One even stumps me: it’s a Sbarro Testa Rossa “Baby,” a pint-sized 1950s race car replica built in the 1980s for children. Vintage cars not only let him weather any tariff-oriented storm, but they also give a sense of the ethos of Autosport Design’s import work. It’s just a means to an end, a way of getting whatever car that their customer desires, whatever the price, wherever it may be.
-
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove -
Image Credit: Raphael Orlove
