BR 42583

Found on a Lithuanian sales site, there was also another Norwegian Santa Fe with fake plates listed. Which is rather surprising as many of the cars were going for less than similar looking ones go for in Norway. (reason why we export so few cars compared to other countries). However this one got exported shortly before inspection, so it might have lots of rust in brakes or sills. Or it has been crashed and repaired using questionable methods. (funnily enough, inspection is due the same day as both mine and my friends car).
I also saw a wrecked Santa Fe on Finnish plates on the same site. Finland is the same as Norway, exports are rare unless the car is an absolute piece of shit

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Actually, exports aren't that rare from Finland and Norway in Estonia. There is quite a lot of vehicles brought from Sweden and Finland as Estonians work there

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Interesting. I would guess if they are working there they might take a car or two with them home. Do you have an idea of what cars from Norway are seen in Estonia? I'd imagine many Transits, Trafics and similar vans being sold there as they are actually relatively cheap here. Commercial vehicles have reduced tax, plus these models have bad depreciation and are seen as inferior to Hiaces, Sprinters and Transporters. But they seem to be very common in the Baltics.

But I guess there aren't any big import companies sending cars there from Norway. At least I have never heard about people selling cars intended for export/to export businesses (unless it's about old Hiaces destined to Africa) whereas this seems to be common in Germany, Sweden, Austria etc.

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I just have to add that Swedish car prices are not comparable with Finnish and Norwegian ones, Sweden has one of the cheapest cars in Europe whereas the others have among the most expensive. This leads to Sweden exporting many second hand cars to both Norway and Finland. (plus many other countries, especially the Baltics, as you already know).

0

The exception is trucks, buses and other heavy machinery. From my city the bus company sent the old buses to Estonia. And it seems to be surpisingly common to find trucks and buses that originally were from Norway all the way to central Asia.

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https://www.auto24.ee/kasutatud/nimekiri.php?bn=3&a=100&aj=&cb=33&ae=2&af=50&ag=0&ag=1&otsi=otsi here is the cars for sale from Norway in Estonia right now. It always surprised me as there is duty to be paid on importing from Norway too... Finnish cars are plentiful and usually have mega miles clocked back before they're registered. Cars in Estonia are pretty cheap for European standards as owning a car there isn't so expensive.

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I was surprised by the amount of cars from Finland, and most do indeed seem to have huge amount of miles on them. As expected, the vast majority were trucks and buses from Norway. But also the cars seemed to be mostly a pretty weird mix of all kinds from mid to late 2000's.

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Denmark has also started importing a LOT of used buses from Norway in recent years. Mainly Mercedes-Benz Integro, Intouro and Tourismo from 2007 to 2014 or thereabout.

There's a story behind this (isn't there always)

In Denmark there are a lot of small8ish) bus operators doing school bus services. This was once done with fleets of mainly danish made DAB and Aabenraa buses, but both of these bus makers shut down years ago so the vehicles were getting older and older on average.

Then, a few years ago, the police did some raids on bus shuttle services for youth sports events like the Dana Cup (soccer) and also some shuttle buses at festivals using buses normally used as school buses.

The results of the police tests were horrible - many of the buses had very poor brakes, were full of rust, bad steering and no seat belts. Many had their plates confiscated on the spot and the stories made national headlines.

The public started raging about how their children were risking their lives every day in ancient s**tty buses.

Although most of the buses could have been fixed, the damage was already done: the old danish buses were now regarded as horrible, unsafe junk, that should have been scrapped many years ago, so the bus operators were almost forced to replace them if they wanted to stay in business.

Many could not afford the upgrade, so several companies went out of business and because authorities had spotted the problems with the old buses, police kept doing raids at every possible opportunity, further emphasizing the crisis.

For some reason, norwegian MB buses became the prefered upgrade for most of the operators, some even bought them in bundles, 10 or more at a time (many of them came from Nettbuss)

A few years have passed now, but the norwegian buses still keep coming, to a point that when you see a school bus, the destination sign is now more likely to be in norwegian than danish!

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Interesting story, thanks for sharing. Here school buses are owned by the regional bus service, so I assume they are less questionable. That is one thing I notice when I travel abroad, the city buses are often much older. And you don't even need to travel far, the difference is noticeable already in Finland and Sweden.

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In my city (Aarhus) the city bus fleet looks like this: 9x MAN Lion's City 3 axle (2009-14), appr. 30x Solaris Urbino 12 (2008-09), a LOT of Solaris Urbino 15 (2011-19), a LOT of Solaris Urbino 18 (dec. 2006-17) plus 4x Volvo 7900E electric buses (2019), so the oldest ones are around 13½ years old.

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If I sm right, Aarhus will get some new electric busses this year.

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