Why Choose Provide Cars?

Smart car dealers use Provide Cars’ access to the thousands of cars, trucks and buses that pass through members-only auctions in Japan every day to get the great deals that give them the edge in their local markets.

Our professional, multilingual staff and advanced online system take the risk out of exporting, letting you concentrate on growing your business.

Give our system a test drive for 14 days here.

Jumvea Logo

Members of the Japan Used
Motor Vehicle Exporters
Association since 1998
(Certificate No. JMVA-151)

FAQ

Can I have a password to see the cars at auction please?

Our online car auction access is password protected. Now, we understand that you want to see what kinds of cars are available at auctions here before you sign up with us, which is why we have created a 14-day free trial log in.

Sign up here, receive your user name and password by email, and log in to check out the cars at auction in minutes. The free trial log in is perfect to see what is available and decide whether sourcing cars from the Japanese auto auctions is going to be right for you. However, when you decide to start buying, then you need to follow this simple process to get a full customer log in:

  1. Complete an application form.
  2. Scan this form and email it to us, or fax it to +81 798 75 0314
  3. Once we have reviewed your application form, we will send you the bank account details for our account to send the surety deposit of 100,000 Yen to.
  4. As soon as the deposit arrives, we will send you your log in information as well as details about how to use the system.
  5. You start bidding and we will guide you through the process, giving you advice along the way as needed.

You can read more about the surety deposit below.

Who can buy through Provide Cars’ Japanese car auction access?

The vast majority of Provide Cars’ customers around the world are car dealers or other business that are looking to buy in bulk. You do not have to be an officially registered car dealer to start buying from us. Since the buying, export and import process is much more involved than simply going to the local car dealership, this is not suitable for most individuals looking for a single car for their own personal use. If you are an individual, please contact us directly rather than completing an application form. If you are looking to buy a number of vehicles, please take a look at our car auction access, and then complete an application form to get started.

Does it cost anything to start buying from car auctions through Provide Cars?

We do not charge a fee for signing up. Our business is selling cars, not milking customers for membership fees! However, we obviously cannot bid on cars which we will have to pay the auction for within a few days unless we know that we are dealing with a serious customer. This is why we require potential buyers to complete and application form and send us a deposit of 100,000 Yen before we can start bidding and buying. This 100,000 Yen is not a membership fee, nor is it a per-car deposit. Basically, we will retain this deposit here for the whole period you are buying from us. If at some point in the future you decide not to buy cars from Japan anymore, you can ask us to close your account and we will refund this deposit to you, minus only the cost of the bank transfer charges, and any money you still owe us for previous purchases (if any).

How do I use your online system?

Whenever you are using a new website or software program it can be difficult to find your way around, so we have made some screencasts (short video presentations) to help you.

You can find screencasts here for both the 14-day free trial system and the full functionality customer system.

How much do particular vehicles sell for at auction?

Whether you are trying to decide whether to buy from the Japanese car auctions or not, or whether you are already a customer but you are trying to decide what would be a sensible level to bid on a particular car, we understand you need to have some idea of the market prices. If you sign up for the 14-day free trial, you can use the “Market Research” function to see what similar cars have sold for in the recent past

Remember that you are not limited to bidding on just one vehicle. You can enter bids on a number of similar cars, but ask us to stop bidding after getting, say, one of them. So, knowing the car auction price history can help you “skim off” the best deals by helping you to know what level to place your bids.

What is the final cost of the car to me?

The final cost of the car to you is more than the basic auction price. The cost of the car at auction is obviously a major component, but it also needs to be exported to you. The charges payable to Provide Cars for a typical, basic purchase are as follows:

  • The auction price of the car. (Note that if you bid 300,000 Yen, but we get it at auction for 278,000 Yen, we will charge you 278,000 Yen - not 300,000 Yen).
  • The cost of moving the car from the auction to the port. (For car auctions on the Japanese mainland, this can vary from 5,000 Yen to 35,000 Yen. You can see this cost on your screen prior to bidding.)
  • Provide Cars’ commission
    - Pre-Pay (pay in advance) = (Auction price of car * 2%) + 70,000 Yen
    - Regular = (Auction price of car * 5%) + 70,000 Yen

** Our commission includes customs clearance fees, deregistration fees, bidding fees and documentation fees that we do not bill to you separately. Please be careful when comparing prices with other suppliers, as many other exporters will charge you these fees in addition to their commission charge.

On top of what you pay us, you will also need to pay the shipping company and any taxes and fees that are required at your end when importing and registering a car. Now, for some countries, additional work is required on the Japan-side. In the case of any work that is not included in the above basic car export, we will arrange it and bill you for it accordingly. Please contact us for more details about your country if this applies to you. Please refer to our Terms of Trade for more details.

Does Provide Cars bid live at the car auctions in Japan?

We do not physically attend the auctions we bid on cars at, for the very simple reason that there are over 90 every week all around the country, and the bidding machines at the auction site work the same as the ones in our office. There is no point adding huge staff costs by actually visitng all the auctions when we can bid remotely just as easily. For most cars we bid live. What this means is that we click a button on our computer to increase our bid until we either get the car, or it goes over our customer’s budget, so that we stop bidding. Now, since we are dealing with fractions of a second, there is a risk that when we get close to the customers budget, a single click on our side could be preceded by other bidders clicking their buttons, resulting in a jump in the price taking, taking it a little over the customers’ maximum bid. We have two choices about how we approach this: First of all, most of our customers realize that, since they are winning cars at auction for less than their budget most of the time, the occasional car bought a little over is not a problem.

For a minority of customers, their maximum bid price is a hard and fast limit. Unfortunately, what this means in practice is that we have to stop bidding a little below their maximum bid price to avoid the risk of a single click pushing the final price over the customer’s maximum bid. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that there are cars which would have been buyable within the customer’s budget that end up being won act auction by other bidders. We adjust our bidding style in consultation with each customer. You can see a video of live bidding here, and more details about bidding here.

When do the auctions start in Japan?

You can see the cars coming up for auction today or tomorrow in our online system. Most auctions will start around 9am. If you are thinking of bidding on cars, it is best to get your bids in several hours prior to this so that we have time to provide you with a translation of the Japanese auction inspector’s report, and you have time to give us your final go ahead or cancelation. If you enter bids after 9am Japan time, there is a real chance that the auction for that car will have already finished by the time your bid was entered. After 12 noon Japan time, it is a better idea to start looking through the following day’s vehicles and entering bids on them. The auctions generally continue into the early evening, although in the Spring, which tends to be the busiest time of year, the larger auctions can continue into the late night, or even the early hours of the morning. (You can see the current local time at our location here.)

When is the car data for the following day’s auctions finalized?

You will start to see car data for a particular day’s auctions available in our online system from a day or two before the auction day itself. This data is basically complete around midnight Japan time at the start of the auction day. However, some auctions add cars at the last minute, so there will be a few later additions in the morning when the auctions are due to be held.

If it costs more to transport the car to the port from a far-off auction, what is the point of buying cars from there?

That is a good question. Why would you be interested in cars from these countryside and regional auctions if the cost of transportation is going to be higher? On the face of it, it seems like the answer is that you should stick to the auctions in the big cities that are close to the ports from where it is cheaper to get the car moved to the port. But if you think like this, you will be missing some great bargains! The reason is that the competition for cars in the big metropolitan areas of Japan, like Osaka and Tokyo, is much greater than at car auctions out in the countryside. If you think about it, it may cost, say, 20,000 Yen more to get the car to the port, but if you end up winning it at auction for 55,000 Yen less, then you have saved money overall. This is why we recommend that you do not limit yourself to buying only from auctions where the transportation cost is low. The best strategy is to bid at the more remote auctions as well, but with lower maximum bid prices.

How can you know whether the car in the auction is any good or not?

Cars are inspected at every auction and given an overall grading. Although the auctions are run by different auction houses, the grading system is pretty similar across the board and you can read more details below. In addition to the overall auction grade, the inspectors also complete a detailed sheet showing the problems and sales points of each car. Obviously, the auction inspectors do not strip each vehicle down and examine every part in detail. This would be impossible. As a result, occasionally the inspectors will miss something. However, in general we find their inspections to be very thorough. This is why we do not send our own staff to the auctions to look over every single car at every auction. The reality is that with the 90+ car auctions we buy from all over Japan every week the extra cost would be prohibitive. However, where we can get a reputable person to give a “third-party” opinion on a vehicle, we can offer you this service. What you would need to bear in mind is that we will need to charge you this inspection cost whether you are able to get the car or not. As a result, we would only recommend you do this if the price you are willing to bid on the vehicle is going to be high enough to stand a good chance of getting it - and even then there are no guarantees. You can read a lot more detail about grading here.

Do some days have more car auctions than others?

The auctions in Japan run six days per week from Monday to Saturday. Out of these days, Monday tends to have the smallest number of vehicles (7,000 to 9,000 or so), and Thursday tends to have the most (38,000 to 53,000 or so). The number of vehicles available at auction tends to have a seasonal high every Spring and then be fairly flat the rest of the year. Different days have a different mix of auctions. So some days you may find more trucks, on other days you will find more foreign (non-Japanese) cars. But there is a good mixture of vehicles every day, so we recommend customers log in and check the available ones each day to make sure they are not missing out on some great deals. You can see which auctions are held on different days of the week here.

How long will it take to get my cars to me?

Our goal at Provide Cars is to try to get the cars to you as quickly as possible. We have every incentive to do this: The quicker you get the cars, the happier you are - and the quicker you will be able to sell them to your customers, make profit on them and come back to buy more cars at the Japanese car auctions through us. To give you an idea of what happens from when you buy a car from the auction to when our involvement ends, have a look at these steps:

1. We buy the car at auction.
2. We pay for the car within a couple of days.
3. The documents are sent from the seller to the auction. (The original seller usually will do this in a day or so, but the auction rules allow him to take up to two weeks.)
4. The documents are sent from the auction to us.
5. The registration of the vehicle for use on the Japanese roads is canceled.
6. At the same time that the documents are being processed for the car export, we start to try to get a booking on the fastest, best value ship to your port.
7. Vehicle documents are sent to the customs brokers.
8. Documents are taken to the Japanese customs for export approval.
9. Documents are sent back to us.
10. The car leaves on a ship bound for your country.
11. BL (Bill of Lading) is issued a few days after the ship has left.
12. We send the BL and other documents (including the Export Certificate, also called the De-Registration Certificate) to you.

The import taxes in my country are very high. Could you change the amounts on your invoices so that I won’t have to pay so much tax?

Of course we want to help you minimize your costs as much as possible. With that in mind we are happy to make invoices with the figures arranged in a way which would be most tax-efficient to you. However, in making invoices, we will only use real figures. If the car auction price was 550,000 Yen, we will not make an invoice for you which says that the full price including all Japan-side costs was 550,000 Yen. There are a number of reasons why we will not falsify figures on invoices, but the main one is that we will not do anything that will compromise our integrity. If you think about it, if you know the car exporter you are buying from is prepared to make false invoices, how do you know that they are not also cheating you? Our customers work with us because they trust us and know that we work with 100% integrity, and we will do nothing which could lose this trust.

Can I get LHD cars from the Japanese car auctions - and what about trucks and buses?

Although Japan is a RHD country, there is a surprisingly large number of LHD cars here. Almost all of these cars are imported brands, such as BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Ford etc. If you are looking for LHD Japanese brands such as Toyota or Nissan, unfortunately you will not be able to get these at the Japanese car auctions in anything more than absolutely minuscule amounts. In terms of trucks, buses and other vehicles, most Japanese car auctions will have a variety of these in addition to the cars. We are also a member of specialist truck auctions where you can get larger vehicles like trucks and buses. When buying these larger vehicles, you have to keep in mind that the transportation costs in Japan (from the auction to the port) are higher than for cars, and with some shipping lines, space for these kinds of vehicles can also be limited. Just because we are called “Provide Cars” does not mean we cannot get other vehicles for you as well.

I see each car has an overall grade. What do these grade numbers mean?

In general the higher the number, the better condition the car is. However, it is more complex than this, so if you want to know more details about the overall grading system used by the Japanese car auctions, please click here. Although the overall grade is a useful yardstick to help you narrow down your bidding to the cars you want everyday, at the same time you need to remember that the grading is a broad brush which only gives you a general idea of the overall quality of the car. First of all, within one grade you have some cars that are only just a little better than those in the grade level below, and there are others that are almost as good as those in the grade level above.

You also have to remember that this grading is very much the judgment of the inspector who is looking at the car. So you might find that an inspector in one auction grades the car as a grade 4, whereas the same car being checked by a different inspector in another auction might well be marked as a grade 4.5. This is why Provide Cars recommends that you only use the grading to narrow down your search for cars to bid on, but then you make your final decision as to which ones you want us to actually bid on live based on our translation of the details of the auction inspector’s report.

Can I cancel a car purchased at auction for me?

You can cancel a bid at any time up to when the car comes up in the live car auction. However, we strongly recommend that you make your final decisions to go ahead with or cancel bids by 9am Japan Time on the morning of the auction. After the car is bought at auction, we are contractually obliged to pay the auction for it. An order for a vehicle can be cancelled at any time between the moment it is bought at auction and the moment it is booked on a ship for transportation from Japan. In the event of cancellation during this time, a cancellation fee of 100,000 Yen + 20% of the auction price of the car must be paid within 14 days, otherwise the cancellation will fail and the full value must be paid. We will then try to dispose of the car. Once the car has been booked on a ship, the order cannot be cancelled and the full value of the car must be paid. See our Terms of Trade for more details.

How do I pay for cars bought through you at the Japanese car auctions?

Payment for cars must be remitted by an Internation Bank Telegraphic Transfer (Bank TT) in Japanese Yen or major non-Japanese currencies. However, if you send money in a non-Japanese currency, you may find that when it arrives and is converted into Yen, it is not enough to cover the Yen amount you owe us. For example, when you send the money on Monday, the exchange rate on that day is such that you calculate that $10,000 USD is enough to cover the 1,100,000 Yen amount you owe to us. However, by the time the payment arrives at our bank in Japan on the Friday, the rate has changed, and your $10,000 USD at that time then only buys you 1,050,000 Yen - 50,000 Yen short. This is why we recommend remitting money in Japanese Yen from your end so that you can be sure that the right amount will arrive.

Please also note that you should inform your bank that all charges should be deducted at your end, as we will only attribute your account with us with the amount of money we actually finally receive from the bank.

To ensure that payments are attributed quickly and accurately to the right customers, each customer is given their own personal bank account number. Each of these starts with 739, and each feeds into our main account. The advantage of this is that when we say payment arriving in a particular 739**** account, we immediately know exactly who it is from. See our Terms of Trade for more details.

What is this deposit of 100,000 Yen you ask for, and why do you need it?

First of all, we should be clear that this 100,000 Yen deposit is not some sort of membership fee. It is a deposit that is held here for the duration of your business with us. Compared with the value of vehicles we will be buying for you, 100,000 Yen (which is about $950 USD at time of writing) is really quite a small amount. The reason we require it is that it shows that you are a serious customer who is not going to walk away after having us buy a car from the car auctions for you. If at some point in the future you decide not to get cars from the Japanese car auctions anymore, we will be happy to refund this deposit to you, minus only any remaining payments you still owe us for previous cars, plus the cost of the bank charges to send it to you.

Do you have cars in stock that I can buy instead of getting them from the Japanese car auctions?

The only cars we have are those that we have bought in the car auctions for our present customers. We have no cars just sitting around in a yard waiting for a customer. The reason we do not hold stock is that we bid at the auctions on the instructions of our customers. So what is the advantage? Well, if you think about it, a big exporter might have a couple of hundred cars in their stock, but at the auctions every day there are tens of thousands of cars. If you buy from an exporter’s stock, the selection is extremely poor - a tiny fraction of one day’s auction vehicles. On top of this, whenever you get a car from someone’s stock, you are almost always getting a car that was originally bought at auction and then had extra margin added on. So, if you buy from stock, you are basically buying an auction car for a higher price. To summarize:

  • Buying from stock limits you to hundreds of vehicles at the most, when buying from auctions gives you access to tens of thousands of different vehicles each day.
  • Stock cars are more expensive than their auction equivalents.

None of our current customers want to buy from stock for the above two reasons. It just does not make sense.

How do you get cars to me?

We handle all of the Japan side purchasing, transporting, deregistering and preparing for export. We then book the shipping for you, whether RORO or container shipping, and arrange for the car to be passed through the Japanese customs procedures as well. If your country requires additional certification, such as JEVIC or JAAI, we arrange this also. If you have any additional needs for Japan-side work, please contact us.

So basically your involvement in the process boils down to deciding which vehicles you want us to bid on and how much you want us to bid up to, and then picking up the car at your end and importing it into your country.

How long has Provide Cars been in the car exporting business?

Provide Cars is owned by a New Zealander who is married to a Japanese. We have a mixture of nationalities on staff, although the majority are Japanese people. We have been in existence since 1998 (and have been members of the Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association since that time - Cert. No. JMVA-151) and have been buying cars from the Japanese car auctions and shipping them overseas from the beginning. At the very start we really were a two-person operation, but since we were one of the first companies to really embrace the Internet, we have seen rapid growth and are now doing a turnover in the tens of millions of dollars per annum range and we are shipping thousands of cars per year. Although we have grown a lot, the fact that we have many car dealers who have bought from us for years is an indication of the good relationships we have cultivated.

You can read more about us here.