I'm an American who moved to Sweden and this is my Subaru WRX that I actually brought with me.

I'm an American who moved to Sweden and this is my Subaru WRX that I actually brought with me. Now right now I'm just changing out the lug nuts on this car, but I thought I would give you guys a little story time of how I actually imported this car here. Most important thing about this process is that I brought it as a moving item, not a regular import. And basically that means I paid no taxes on it bringing it here, no import fees. Um basically the only thing I paid for was the actual shipment. Now to bring it as a moving item, you have one year from the date that you moved here to the date that the car enters the country. And my initial thought was to actually sell this car. So I moved here in 2024 and I posted the car on Facebook Marketplace at that time and didn't really get any offers that were that great. And so this is my my baby and I really didn't want to let it go for for too cheap. And so I was kind of stuck. I felt like I don't want to sell it for too low, but bringing it here is an unknown. I don't know how that works. I don't know who to contact. And so time went by. And then I actually went to the Gothenburg Classic Car Weekend, which is a huge car event here and I met a guy named Niklas. Uh they actually have a YouTube channel, Dream Wrench Drive. I'll uh link it down below. So Niklas asked me, what do you drive? We were just chit-chatting and I said, oh I drive a Subaru WRX but it's in the US, it's it's for sale. And he said, well why don't you bring it here? And I told him it was an unknown, don't know how to do it. And he said, don't worry about it. Uh you know, give me your contact information and we'll get it settled. And so he helped me a ton throughout the process and got me in contact with a company called Nordtrafik. And basically Nordtrafik is kind of like the middleman for logistics of this whole process of shipping it. So I got in contact with them and they told me that they would handle the shipment from picking it up in Texas to uh it arriving at the port of Gothenburg. Now by the time that I had decided that I was going to bring this car here, I had about six weeks left until that one year deadline. And after that deadline I was going to have to pay about $15,000 US dollars to register it, import fees, reverting it back to stock, which is probably the biggest headache of it all besides the money. And so, you know, time was ticking. And so initially, my thought was okay it'll go from the port of Galveston, which was like the nearest port from where I lived, to Gothenburg. Just one one simple boat ride across the ocean. But that wasn't really the case. Um Nordtrafik told me that basically Ford and other large car manufacturers in the US have priority on the ships from the port of Galveston and that if they needed uh a slot on that ship, they would take my car off and put one of their cars on instead. And so that that would, you know, result in the delay. Um so ultimately, they told me the fastest way to get it here is actually to go through New Jersey or New York. And so because of that, um it had to go by trailer. So it was loaded up onto an 18-wheeler, picked up from my house in the US, shipped all the way by trailer to New Jersey, and then from New Jersey it was shipped by boat to Gothenburg. Now that trip from New Jersey to Gothenburg was not a simple one. It stopped in Liverpool, I think Antwerp, Hamburg, and a few other places before it actually got to Gothenburg. So time was ticking, I was tracking it. Um my mom actually threw in an AirTag in the car for the whole shipping process, which was really fun to actually track it. But in the end it actually made it here on time. Um I went to the port of Gothenburg, um but first I had to stop at customs where I had to show them a whole ton of documentation about ownership of the car, uh proof that it was mine, proof that I had driven it, um because basically there's a requirement that you have to have driven the car for one year before you move here for it to be considered yours and to for it to be considered a moving item. So I had a friend of mine drop me off at the customs, I gave them all my documentation, they approved it, stamped it, and I walked down to the port of Gothenburg to Nordtrafik's office where I actually went and picked up the car. And when I picked it up, it was packed with stuff. I had actually had my dad fill it with all of my stock parts, um just in case during the registration process here they told me that I have to throw on my old mufflers or do something with my lights. So when I picked it up, it was obviously one of the best days ever. I hadn't driven this car in a year. It's my baby. I was so excited to have it here in Sweden, which just still to this day doesn't feel real because I bought this car new in Texas, drove it for five years, and then what had, you know, already planned on selling it. So I'll throw in some clips of actually going and picking it up. And first thing I did was I drove it home with the Texas plates, went and got it washed, and then uh yeah, came home. So this is just part one of this series. I'm thinking for part two, I'll go through all the documentation that was needed uh for customs to approve it. And then part three is I'll show you how it got registered and road legal here because that was also another process.