Not a trailer this time, but it is crossing. A colleague is transferring to the customer's US plant and wants to drive his own pickup up: a 1986 Toyota 4x4 that started life in California and went into Mexico in 2002. He holds the original California title, the Mexican import papers from 2002 and the current Mexican registration in his name. He asked me because I do border paperwork, and I only ever do parts.
Does a vehicle that was American to begin with still answer to EPA and DOT on the way back, and does he owe duty on it? He has every document; I want to know which window they go to before he drives to the bridge.
Age answers the standards question, not birthplace. NHTSA treats a vehicle 25 years or older as exempt from its rules and from EPA. Yours is well past that. Exempt does not mean paperless. He still fills in the DOT and EPA forms and declares the truck to CBP at the crossing. Title, the Mexican import papers, the registration, all in the cab, originals. Do not send him to the bridge with copies.
What physically happens is simple: he drives up, pulls into the lane, and declares the truck as an import with the papers on the seat beside him. The forms Dale lists are done then, not weeks before. The bit to prepare for is the money. Duty is charged on value above the personal exemption of $800, so someone at the booth will want a figure for what a 1986 pickup is worth. Agree that with him before he leaves, or he will be arguing it with a queue behind him.
Tomas, the eight hundred is the souvenir window: it covers what he bought on the trip. A truck he has driven since 2002 is not a souvenir.
He wants the other window. Customs lets a vehicle taken out of the States for private use come back duty free if you prove it was owned and registered there, and a state registration card does it. So the California title is the argument, not the value. Whether it holds after all those years on Mexican plates, no idea.
Two questions here. On standards, age decides rather than origin, as Dale says, and being Californian earns him nothing extra. On duty, what has been said is that he pays on value above the personal exemption; nobody has said whether the truck's American origin changes that, and I would not assume it does without asking at the crossing. The practical consequence: his papers are likely enough, and the open item is the value he declares.
I would have guessed the opposite, that a truck which started out in the US could simply come home, and that origin mattered more than age. Since it is age that decides, one specific question: the personal exemption of $800, is that the same allowance a traveller gets for goods in their luggage, and does it still apply when the thing being imported is the vehicle he arrives in? I could not find that spelled out anywhere I looked.
