Talk of ‘club plates’ brings up an interesting point and let me say at the outset I have no practical knowledge or experience in this area, what I know is only what I’ve read on the net and I have not talked to the RTA or RTA signatories/engineers so my interpretation may be complete crap and I also live in the home state of the fun police, NSW so my ‘knowledge’ is skewed towards achieving rego in NSW for an imported car. I’m sure some of you on this forum know much more about these issues than me and believe me, I’d love to be proved wrong. In theory you can import any vehicle manufactured before the 1st of January 1989 without restriction but it can’t be registered LHD unless it is at least 30 years old and it has to comply with the ADRs that were relevant at the time of manufacture. Vehicles manufactured after the 1/1/89 need to be imported through the RAW scheme and comply with the raft of ADRs.
Anyway, it seems to me that due to a couple of factors, that just maybe, from next year there will be a better opportunity to import replica cobras, assuming nobody moves the goal posts in the interim.
1) A favourable exchange rate…. maybe, who knows? If China can generate enough internal demand and keep importing our resources our currency should be pretty strong against the USD and British pound. In my opinion, the deflationary pressures in the world market as debt is unwound will probably keep the price down on all sorts of assets including these cars for quite a few years.
2) There will be a larger pool of eligible cars to choose from as some of the early replica cars such as Arntz and Contemporary will be reaching 30 years of age, please note this does not mean titled as a 1965 Cobra blah blah blah. It means it was manufactured and was first registered 30 years ago. At 30 years of age they can be conditionally registered as LHD without major compliance issues having to be addressed, as long as you are a member of an RTA recognised Historic Vehicle Club. The car can only be driven to and from club sanctioned events and to and from repairers. I did ring the RTA a while ago seeking information about what was involved in getting the Cobra club recognized by the RTA as a Historic Vehicle club but gave up waiting for them to return my call. Street rod registration is for pre 1949 vehicles only.
So in summing up as far as this newish Factory Five’s future on NSW roads go; err it seems a tad bleak to me and as Craig said “what on earth is the new owner going to do with it???” Unless of course it really was manufactured in 1965 as stated!
