Welcome and congrats!

I'd love to hear more details about purchasing cars in Singapore. Would you care to elaborate on the fees, taxes and how all of that works?

Cheers,

Matty

 

The purchase of cars here is a very transparent albeit expensive process. The bottom line of the system is to control the number of private cars in the country as it is a small place.

Basically, the price of a car is reflective of two taxes applied. The first relates to the import duty and other taxes levied on the car at point of sale. Essentially the price paid by the importer attracts a 100% arrival tax (this is called PARF) and a import duty of 20%. As the price paid for the car by importers to the factory is published we can assess the total price that the dealer then adds on. (my car has a PARF value of SGD$151,000 which therefore means the car itself was worth this price on arrival then the government added $151K and $30K in taxes). By the time you add GST and registration charges plus a healthy margin for the dealer the registered value would have been around SGD$400,000!

Then you have to buy a licence to put the car on the road. This is a 10 year entitlement to leave the car registered in Singapore (this is called Certificate of entitlement or COE). The COE licenses are issued to the general market on a 2 weekly basis in limited numbers and essentially represent the number of deregistered cars for 10 years ago. The current bidding value of a COE is SGD$92,000.

So...if you look at a new 991 Carrera the price is about $550,000 today.

However, there is a "flipside" to this system. When you deregister you car you get a proportional refund from the government for your PARF value (my car would get around $110,000 in rebates today) as well as a pro-rata refund on the unused period of the COE.

Therefore, as an Australian I can take this car home in a year and get a 50% refund for my purchase price.

Hope this explains a little.

 

Thanks, that is very informative. No wonder the streets are so clean.

 

Welcome to the forum. Its good to see another person here from Singapore. There is a singapore forum but its pretty inactive. If there anything that i can help please feel free to pm.