Geisha Kow­lessar

Lo­cal car deal­ers will have to wait as long as three more months for for­eign used ve­hi­cles and parts to ar­rive in T&T from Japan fol­low­ing the dead­ly earth­quake which rocked the East Asian is­land yes­ter­day.

And cus­tomers may have to brace them­selves for in­creased freight costs as the price of ship­ping is ex­pect­ed to sky­rock­et. Pop­u­lar car deal­er and for­mer pres­i­dent of the Pre-Owned Car Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion In­shan Ish­mael, how­ev­er, as­sured there was no need to pan­ic. In­ter­viewed yes­ter­day, Ish­mael said cor­re­spon­dence he re­ceived via e-mail from Japan­ese car deal­ers sug­gest­ed that most of the dam­age was done to the out­skirts of the is­land and not to the zones where the ma­jor­i­ty of the for­eign-used cars were stored.

"I re­ceived six e-mails from the car deal­ers in Japan who as­sured that the zones, called "open yards" where the cars were stored were most­ly safe, very lit­tle dam­age was done to those ar­eas," Ish­mael said. How­ev­er, he said, be­cause the ports of Japan were be­ing con­vert­ed in­to ar­eas to pro­vide dis­as­ter re­lief "noth­ing could be sent out of the coun­try." "Get­ting the cars out of Japan is the prob­lem be­cause noth­ing can leave since the ports are be­ing used for oth­er pur­pos­es. "Lo­cal deal­ers would have to wait some six to eight weeks or even a lit­tle longer to get their cars and parts out of Japan be­cause at the mo­ment the coun­try's ground trans­porta­tion is crip­pled," Ish­mael said. He said most of the lo­cal deal­ers had stocks to ral­ly them through that pe­ri­od, main­tain­ing that T&T should not go in­to "pan­ic mode."

Ve­hi­cles al­so com­ing from Sin­ga­pore would be de­layed since they were sent to the Japan­ese ports for trans­ship­ment to the Caribbean re­gion.

Warn­ing that some deal­ers may try to cap­i­talise on Japan's cat­a­stro­phe, Ish­mael said this may re­sult in cus­tomers hav­ing to ab­sorb ad­di­tion­al freight costs which would def­i­nite­ly in­crease. "There would def­i­nite­ly be some fi­nan­cial im­pact and as some deal­ers would want to cap­i­talise on the tragedy and sell at very high prices. "There would be oth­er deal­ers who could ab­sorb that cost and still main­tain their prices at a rea­son­able lev­el," Ish­mael said. He said the le­gal quo­ta of used cars be­ing im­port­ed in­to T&T was 13,000 an­nu­al­ly. But fol­low­ing the mas­sive dev­as­ta­tion, that fig­ure was ex­pect­ed to sig­nif­i­cant­ly de­crease dur­ing the com­ing months. "There is noth­ing no one in the lo­cal for­eign used car in­dus­try could do ex­cept wait un­til some lev­el of nor­mal­cy is brought to Japan. "We al­ready have a mar­ket where for­eign used cars and parts are eas­i­ly avail­able and we have to now re­ly on that for now," Ish­mael added.