By Steven Cole Smith
Jun 26, 2020
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shipping,
Buying and Selling,
Oversees
There’s no question that the number of students in the U.S. taking Latin has dropped significantly over the past century or so.
Still, at least one Latin term perseveres, especially in the automotive realm: caveat emptor, which means, of course, “Let the buyer beware.” And while buying a car here in the U.S. can be an onerous task, buying a car from overseas just has caveat emptor written all over it.
Bruce Trenery, owner of Fantasy Junction, the renowned auto broker in Emeryville, California, has shopped the world for collector cars since he bought the business in 1976. And he has heard sob stories ever since.
A favorite: A college student, on vacation in Burma, bought a Mercedes-Benz 540K at a bargain price. “He had some pictures of it, and I recognized it right away as a replica, because we’d had replicas here. He didn’t want to hear it,” Trenery recalls. “It turned out somebody had a replica that they had apparently imported from the U.S. to Europe, and when he got tired of it, he sold it to this kid as an original car. You have to be careful. If it seems too good to prove, it probably is.”
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