Vehicles advertised through Trade Carview

Trade Carview is a commercial website that allows dealers in Japan to pay to advertise their cars to people in other countries who might want to purchase and import them. Trade Carview is excellent at promotion and in a couple of years has become quite well known for people with no experience to search for cars since their website is all in English, and they are heavily involved in advertising.

However, J-Spec are not fans of Trade Carview, we have seen many people burnt by substandard cars, sellers who have no idea about the import laws in Australia, and many people end up with a poorer car than they could have had because they simply didn't know better. Trade Carview makes finding a car for members of the general public far easier, but for people in the trade who know what they are doing (such as ourselves) we can see that it is often not in a customer's best interests to buy from there, and in most situations by NOT recommending Trade Carview vehicles we are saving our customers heartache or a substandard deal, which is of course the very definition of our job. That's not to say that all cars on Trade Carview are of poorer condition or the information we can get on them not up to scratch, but in our experience this is quite often the case.

We can purchase cars from Trade Carview and can often get better information on the cars there than members of the general public can, but we find more often than not the cars are not recommendable, so while we're happy to look at cars from there that people bring to our attention, don't set your hopes too high.

Common issues we come across with Trade Carview:

• Cars are simply not up to a standard which we would consider to be acceptable, or the quality of information we can get on them is not
• Sellers do not know the Australian import laws and will sell a car which is not compliable in Australia either because it is the wrong model (we can always make sure that is correct at least) or because it is not eligible due to condition (accident history, chassis damage, rust, etc).
• The information on cars is insufficient to buy with confidence, often Trade Carview dealers expect people to buy cars with half a dozen photos and barely any information on condition, which is just unacceptable
• Often cars are not actually owned by Trade Carview dealers or are in their possession, meaning they can't tell us any first hand information about condition. Worse still often they are cars from other dealers or wholesale networks with a profit margin just put on top, which means not only is the price higher, but often we can just go and buy the car directly and save some money without the middle man.
• Since many sellers on Trade Carview are trying to sell cars to members of the general public they are usually only one off transactions with no long term relationship being built. As such the information on cars is sometimes not very reliable as there is no loss to them if bridges are burnt.

As you can see, we don't think highly of Trade Carview based on our experiences and the experiences of others we have observed. That said we can buy from there and we have come across some good dealers and contacts there (they just aren't as common as we'd like), so the bottom line is if people want to buy a car from Trade Carview we can try things out and judge each car and dealer on their merits.

Because some cars at Trade Carview are at the poorer end of the condition scale, please do not use Trade Carview as a necessarily accurate indication of pricing for a good condition car.