Jump to content
Model Cars Magazine Forum

Do cars owned by US servicemen in the UK have special plates or stickers?


Recommended Posts

I have a couple car kits that are left hand drive. I was thinking it would be cool to build a model of a car owned by a US serviceman stationed in the UK. (especially for cars that never got imported to the US)

Would this just be a matter of throwing some UK plates on it and calling it good, or would a US serviceman in the UK have special plates or stickers that may be obvious on a model?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Probably more than you want to know:

http://tinyurl.com/nq4bl7s

US Service personnel can import a US vehicle, but it still gets a a UK number plate. Obviously, any car bought in the UK will come with a UK plate anyway. I have seen American cars, usually SUVs, driving around here (we're not far from Menwith Hill) with US plates (notably, Virginia plates... I wonder why ;-)). I'm not sure how the legalities of that work, whether they have to get a UK registration within a certain period of time. Either way, whatever the car is, they carry no very obvious distinctive marks (helps to stop activists or actual terrorists targeting the vehicle), but they may have some kind of base pass/ID in the window that I haven't spotted...

I don't know whether the tax-break works in reverse... ie can you buy a British made car at a 25% discount as long as you ship it straight back to the US when you leave the country? I can imagine a C-17 could carry quite a few DBS's back home...

bestest,

M.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the info and link Matt!

So it looks like a US serviceman buying a car over there needs a UK plate, a tax disk in the lower left window, and pink vehicle pass on the sun visor.

(seems like everyone needs the tax disk over there right?)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My father was in the US Army when I was growing up and we lived in Germany from 1969-72. Back then my parents both got International drivers licenses. The license plates were standard US size plates marked "USA" which had silver letters on a green plate. The car also had the white oval "USA" sticker on the back. In short, especially if it was an American car, they stuck out like sore thumbs in local traffic. I still have a pair of those plates. The US authorities handled the whole thing. Americans never needed to deal with German DMV.

Personnel over a certain rank were eligible for the government to pay for boat shipment of one car, both over and back. A family could have two cars, with the second being bought locally. There was a fair trade of cars being passed on by servicemen leaving to new arrivals. When we arrived in 1969 we bought a red VW Beetle from someone leaving. When we left we sold it to someone arriving. My father shipped our 1966 Valiant to Germany and back again. In those days, the tax situation was that if you bought a German car and drove it locally for 6 months, it could be brought back to the US duty free. The German companies all sold US spec cars to servicemen. So there were a lot of VWs and Mercedes driving around US army posts. BMWs and Audis hadn't really caught on yet.

US cars could be disposed of by selling them to another US service person or turn it in for scrap. The army post had it's own junkyard where you could get US car parts. I remember going there with my father to get a starter for our Valiant from an old Dart. Thinking back, the cars in the junkyard weren't all that old, some of them less than five years old.

I don't know what the deal is today. I expect it to be more complex.

And I think it would be a pain in the tail to ship a left hand drive car to England. I think I'd just buy a local right hand drive car when I arrived.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I looked into this about 5 years ago for someone who was wanting to take his modified 4wd on holiday to the UK with him so he could use it off road while there.

IIRC you can drive a foreign registered vehicle in the UK on foreign plates as long as it is roadworthy in the UK, has third party insurance and meets all the requirements to be used in it's country of registration*.

For a car from New South Wales that meant that it could only be used in the UK until it's annual certificate of roadworthyness ran out as there would be no way to get it reinspected by a NSW state government inspector while it was in the UK (although I suppose you could fly one out?).

However, as the car in question was registered in Victoria where we have no annual inspection he could have driven his car round the UK for as long as he wanted so long as he kept paying his annual vehicle registration fee and had someone post him the sticker to put on his windscreen.

Of course poms drive on the correct side of the road like we do so there would have been no worries about LHD.

In the end though he didn't go through with it as his car had a dedicated LPG engine and there was a lack of servos that he could fill it up at.

*If you think about it the existence of car ferries to and from mainland europe & scandinavia and the drive on drive off channel tunnel train service mean that it has to be possible.

Edited by zenrat
Link to comment
Share on other sites

*If you think about it the existence of car ferries to and from mainland europe & scandinavia and the drive on drive off channel tunnel train service mean that it has to be possible.

There has to be an agreement about driving cars in other countries with your home plate, registration and license. People go on vacation all over Europe. I know when we were there we took our little Valiant with the USA military plates in several different countries.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...