To be exempt from paying Irish VAT on a car the imported car needs to be
at least 6-months old and have 6000kms on the clock - so it is not
generally feasible to re-register a brand new car unless the UK dealer
can supply free-of-VAT (not easy to do). Some Northern Ireland dealers
may be VAT registered on both sides of the border, however dealers then
encounter problems with the distributors if they try to do the first
registration outside the country of supply.



Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT) is applied to the car based on a formula
which varies between 14 & 36% of the estimated Irish open market value
of the car, the % is determined by the CO2 emissions (broadly similar to
the UK bands). There is a good VRT estimator on the Revenue website,
note that added extras will attract additional duty on a sliding scale
if the car is less than 5 years old.



Another important factor in running costs is the annual road tax regime
the car falls under, if a car has a clean burning engine then buyers
should aim to source a car registered after 1/1/8, if the car has a high
CO2 then it is important to buy one registered before 30/6/8 (there was
a brief overlap of regimes - cars registered in the first 6-months of
2008 can elect for whichever system costs them less).



Finally, any new Irish resident can save themselves a lot of money if
they import their own car from the UK, so long as it was owned and
regularly used for 6-months abroad and is not disposed of for 1-year he
could import one car free of all duties (can be availed of once every
5-years).



Just under 60k new cars will be registered in
Ireland in 2009 (down from 200k in 2007!). The number of used imports
registered so far in 2009 will come close to 40k - the vast majority of
them sourced from the UK. With the new tax regime (for those that can
afford it) it makes particular sense to import a 08 or newer clean
burning diesel - the BMW 320/520, Audi A4, VW Golf & Passat, Skoda
Octavia, Ford Focus and Volvo S40 are being imported in large numbers.