The Daimler has been resting after the long trip to Lapland. We've been waiting the Finnish customs to declare how much tax we have to pay. Last week a I got a letter, which had this blue and very official looking Tulli logo on it.
Gulp, the lottery machine had done it's job. Our estimate was somewhere between 1000?2500 euros, depending on how they value our old shed. Daimlers are generally taxed as Jaguar XJ6s, but you can never be sure. Anyway, these are rather rare cars. That is a problem, as the statistic variations between each Jag/Daimler sold is quite large. You can find few 25 000 euro X308s in the country, and there might be few rotting 5500 euro examples too. All together you can usually find maybe 8?15 cars for sale. It's not enough to calculate realiable average price.
The way the customs calculate the tax is quite simple: first they check the original tax percentage given to the car when it was new (28,5 in our case). Then they guestimate the value of our example by checking the fleet in Nettiauto.com (totally private, but good source if the population is large enough). They take few close calls and adjust the value a bit by milagea etc. I filed a huge number of photos from all of the optical issues with the car, but that was no use. Apparently it's over 20 year old car anyway, so they automatically assume it must be a shitbox.
The result?
1288 euros. Pfew, could've been much worse. I've to pay that by the end of the year, then the Daimler is MOT away from being road legal (hello, Posmo and your welding machine). Obviously we're going to file a complaint, it might drop the tax a bit, and it also gives us better chances to fight if the way Finland is treating used imports change in the future.