I was reading Clausager’s XK120 in Detail book, and he lists 145 Personal Export Delivery or PED cars sold through various UK dealers. I see Sammy Newsome of Coventry sold only one PED LHD FHC, and it was in '51. This has to be my car.
Clausager indicates they were tax free, and he speculates that a large percentage of them went to US military personnel stationed in Europe, although mine went to a Frenchman.
So does anybody know anything more about PED cars? The question arises, were there any other special concessions, any optional equipment, special orders made available to these buyers?
Between 1946 and 1973 the UK had a sales tax levied on the wholesale price of goods which we used to call Purchase Tax (PT). The rate varied but on luxury goods it was 33 1/3% which later fell to 25% which was also the rate in effect when we moved to Value Added Tax (VAT) on 1/1/73.
The idea of the Personal Export scheme was that if you bought a new car and intended to export it within one year you did not have to pay the PT at the time of purchase. If you didn’t export the vehicle within the year you then had to cough up the money you owed but as far as I remember there was no interest to pay. In the meantime, you could use the car.
Normally, dealers arranged the PE but cars were very often collected direct from the factory. A friend of mine did this with a new MG in 1970 and my Triumph Stag was also purchased in this way by the previous owner. Neither car ever left the UK.
The scheme was abused because people, my friend included, used it to defray the cost of a new car by effectively obtaining an interest free loan of a sizeable amount of the price. I don’t know the details of how one qualified to be included in the scheme but although my friend had no intention of exporting his car he did own property in Australia at the time.
Whether these arrangements continued after the introduction of VAT I don’t know. They may have done so for a time but now I think you can’t use the vehicle in the UK if you don’t pay the VAT and you intend to export to Europe because you can’t register it in the UK.
Others may know more about this than me but that is what I remember happened at the time.
Hi Rob, have a look at “Jaguar XK120 in the Southern Hemisphere” where I wrote quite a lot about Purchase Tax, the Home Delivery Export scheme, and covenants required against re-sale by BMMT. One court case in Australia and at least one in the UK. No special specs for such cars although I did read that ordering twin exhausts was possible for such cars (I think in Clausager). - John E