I've been wanting to go through all of my receipts and get a grand total and to lay all the costs out so that people can see what it really costs to bring a car up from the States. The total cost for me to bring my car from San Diego to my driveway was $7100CAD. This was a car that I paid $5000USD for. Whether or not you think that was a good deal or not, is arguable, but this is to show how the costs add up. There are a lot of variables and I can guarantee that I could have done it for a lot less, and I'll go into more detail here.
The coles notes of the trip was that my Father picked me up after work on a Wednesday and we drove in his Tacoma down to Seattle and parked it at a motel near the airport. They had a shuttle that took us to the airport at some god awful early morning hour. We flew into San Diego and met the seller. He took us to the car, and him and I went for a spin, signed some papers, handed over some money and we all ate lunch together. Then my Dad and I started driving in the general direction of home. I was adamant that we check out some of the fabled canyon roads, and drive up the coast on the way back, so we spent the first day in the Canyons, and part of day two on the coast, then we headed up I-5 after crossing the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco. We drove the car to Everett where Martin was kind enough to allow me to leave the car there for the required border wait time. Randy and I drove down a couple of days later and I brought the car back over the border and home. The inspection caught a bunch of silly minor things which were cleared up with Eric's help and the car is now a legal Canadian immigrant.
This should give you a quick run down of the costs that I ran into. This does NOT include the repair necessary to get past the inspection, but I only had to buy a light for the dash since I borrowed the other parts, but I suspect that if I had to buy them all new it would be under $200.
A few very important variables to note are;
1. The currency Exchange Rate
2. Distance from you to the car
3. How comfortably you travel
4. Insurance agents often interpret things differently...
5. Other stuff
Regarding those notes...
1. I withdrew $5600USD cash from the bank the day before flying out, and I learned that they like to have notice of withdrawals of US currency over $2500, so that scared me, but it worked out fine. I still have a bunch of USD left over since I ended up using plastic most of the way.
The carfax and paypal deposit were done at roughly the same time hence the similar exchange rate.
The four tanks of gas were paid on my debit card because most of the US pumps ask for a zip code when using a credit card and didn't like me trying to lie, so that was the rate that I was stuck with.
When I brought the car over the border the rate changed in my favour
2. San Diego is pretty far from Vancouver, and since I love Socal, I decided that I was going to take the opportunity to drive some of the great canyon roads and the coast instead of boring I-5. This adds to time and gas costs, but for me it was very much worth it, and I plan to do it again and get some more of the roads that I couldn't get too because of my time constraints (silly work!). I would have saved something like 7 hours, but those were some of the best 7 hours I've ever had behind the wheel.
3. I was initially planning on sleeping for a couple of hours here and there at highway rest stops, but at the last minute my Dad decided that he wanted to join me and I couldn't convince the old man that sleeping in an MR2 was a good idea. We did cheap out on the motels though since we arrived late and left early. he paid for two night and I paid for one. The first one was a Howard Johnson near Seatac that let us leave his truck there while we were gone. The second place was a $49 Motel 6 that had cinder blocks in the mattresses and the third was in Medford and was actually quite nice. The plane ticket was nothing special, and I was pissed because my Dad bought his ticket 2 days before the flight and got it for $99! So you could say that I would be in for another $150 or so.
4. Since I've done this once before I thought I knew the process, but different insurance agents might tell you different things. I was told that I couldn't put a storage policy on the car while it was going through the inspection process, so I bought a second binder of insurance, and when that ran out I went to get another one and was told that I could in fact buy a storage policy...
5. I did not include the cost of:
- a jug of coolant and one of oil, just in case
- food, we mostly just bought pop, coffee and granola bars since we spent most of our time driving. I did chow down at the continental breakfast at the Medford hotel, it was messy.
Anyways, I hope this helps.