I had some correspondence with the UKMA about the current dust up in the Irish parliament over the metrication of speed limit signs in Ireland with respect to the kind of education campaign that will be carried out and what the new specific speed limits will be. As part of that correspondence the existence of grey imports in Ireland came up. Since there were also postings to this list asking about what kind of speedometers and odometers (metric vs. Imperial) are currently in use in Ireland, I thought I would pass this along to the list.
> > Grey imports are pre-owned Japanese > cars which were very extensively imported into Ireland in the late 1980's > and throughout the 1990's, though not so much now as the economy has > improved meaning more people can afford to buy new cars. These are like > Irish specification cars in that they are right-hand drive (Japan and > Ireland drive like the UK, on the left), and the only difference is that > they have km odometers and km/h speedometers. There are thousands of them > on Irish roads. > > They are called grey imports because they originate outside the EU and are > not intended for the European market. The cars themselves are perfectly > legal and as Irish law only requires a car's speedometer to be accurate; the > fact that they display km and km/h only is not considered a problem.
