To safely buy sight unseen...and overseas : \
 

Sooo...irrationally, I'm considering including overseas sellers in my search for a really nice euro E28. All advice or dissuasion welcome. I blame this car for putting me into overdrive.

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A fool and his money are soon parted...

That video was clearly made in the US. Surely you can find a Pelican type who's not too far from whatever area your target car is based.

A car I'm considering is being advertised from Gottingen Germany.

I'm guessing we have a German Pelican who can check it out for you.

It may be better to start a thread in the 911 forum linking back to this one.

Have you ever bought a car overseas, arranged for pickup, shipping? Its fairly involved. One thing to buy another to get it to your home. You'll need a liaison / connection over there to get the car safely to container and onto the ship. I would do the cheapest round trip to inspect / drive in person.

Anything less than that leaves the door wide open unless you've done business with them before.

I think some brokers offer inspection services, but you need to be damn careful choosing your broker. I’ve sold cars overseas three times, two to Germany and one to Puerto Rico. In all three cases the buyers used a broker to handle the logistics of shipping, import/export, and all of the other paperwork. Which is an easy $2k+ added to the purchase price.

Back in the early 80's the big thing was to import MB's and Porsche from Germany. We would go over, find a good deal them pay a broker to ship them home. I tried to ship one myself, what a nightmare. So much paper work and waiting. I gave up and let a broker handle it.

I don't know about Germany but I think they have annual roadworthiness checks for all cars over a certain age, as we do in the UK( except for very old cars here ,which are exempt.)We can check the inspection history on the intetnet as it is a public
record, and items that are not yet a fail but could do with attention are also listed as advisories. If a car has persistent multiple advisories it's a sign of an ill maintained vehicle.Maybe Germany has a similar system

Nice E28. There are many clean E28's around, harder to find a euro though.

Right! Another issue is finding one without rust or a B-pillar crack near the roof.

Without rust should not be that hard to find if it lived on the west coast, B pillar crack I didn't know that was a problem, possibly caused from stiff suspension that mine does not have.

I was unaware of the b-pillar issue until recently. I can't quote frequency or definitive cause but am being told that it often begins behind the trim pieces and may be a result of design flaw, damage or excessive engine torque--which sounds like a stretch (unless engine swapped) but I'm not an expert. Your theory sounds as plausible as any of the others.

Buy the E28 here, get bumpers from Europe, or, find a Euro / converted E28 already here.

Stay away from the 'e's and look for 'i' or 'is' models. My e28 535i was one of my favourite cars...put close to 450K km on it.

Too many stories of fraud with people losing lots of cash or getting a very poor car buying sight unseen.

Even trusted sites like Bring a Trailer can be misleading. I've seen a car on BAT in person that was local to me sell for way more than it deserved. Pictures and description made it out to be a much stronger car than it was.

Those engines really were built right, on my 533i at 550,000 km i had to rebuild the cylinder head to pass e-test, never touched bottom end and finally scrapped the car at 734,433km (456kmiles) I still have the instrument cluster, engine pulled hard as ever but city road salt killed the chassis.