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The Chicken Tax Is Why This $13K Hilux Costs $21K to Land

In 1962, European farmers were furious about cheap American chicken flooding their markets. West Germany led the pushback. Tariffs went up. US chicken exports collapsed.

President Johnson decided to hit back.

In 1964 he imposed retaliatory tariffs on four European imports: potato starch, dextrin, brandy, and light trucks. The other three got dropped within a few years. The truck tariff never did.

Sixty-one years later, it's still sitting there. And it's the reason a 1994 Toyota Hilux that's been sitting in the UK for thirty years walks into the United States paying the same 25% duty it would have paid the day it rolled off the production line.

Nobody named it after trucks. Nobody named it after tariffs. They named it after the thing that started the argument. The Chicken Tax!

And it matters a lot more than most people importing cars realise.

There's a 1994 Hilux on Car and Classic right now. White, five-speed manual, 106k miles, one of the cleanest fifth-generation examples I've seen. The kind of truck that gets used hard and falls apart, except this one didn't.

Most people see something like this and assume the 25-year rule handles everything. It handles a lot. No EPA conversion, no DOT compliance paperwork, no grey market headaches. For a car that's exactly right.

But the Hilux isn't a car. It's a light truck. And the Chicken Tax doesn't care how old it is. Most people assume the 25-year rule means 2.5% duty. For a pickup truck, it doesn't. You still pay 25%. The age exemption and the tariff are completely separate things.

I ran it through our import calculator at £10,000, a reasonable landing point for a truck in this condition.

Total landed cost: $21,595. Import fees of $8,094. About 60% on top of the purchase price.

That $3,900 tariff line in the breakdown isn't a modern invention. It's a 1964 retaliatory measure over poultry that nobody ever bothered to repeal, quietly making itself felt every time someone tries to bring a pickup truck into the United States from anywhere in the world, crazy!

You're not bidding on a £10,000 truck. You're bidding on a $21,595 truck with a sixty-year-old chicken dispute baked into the price.

The calculator is there if you want to run your own numbers.

Interesting Auctions

The P30 E63 wagon in RWD is the one people describe when they explain why they got into AMGs. Not the sedan. Not the base wagon. This exact configuration. Someone always has a story about the first time they heard one pull away from a light, or the moment they realized a family car could do that.

Mercedes built the E63 wagon in a way that made no logical sense and every emotional kind of sense. Five-point-five liters, twin turbos, hand-built, 550 horsepower, driving the rear wheels through a limited-slip differential in a car with a liftgate and rear entertainment screens. The P30 package piles on another 32 horsepower and 74 lb-ft, the adaptive air suspension, the 19-inch AMG wheels, and the red calipers. It is, on paper, completely unnecessary. That's the whole point.

This one is 34k miles, bone stock, West Coast its entire life, never seen snow. Two owners, clean Carfax, service records from new. November 2025 Service B. Fresh Pilot Sport 4S tires dated mid-2024. Nothing has been touched that shouldn't have been touched.

Cars like this are easy to talk about and harder to actually find in this condition. The ones that have been driven hard, modified, or just quietly neglected are everywhere. A stock, low-mile P30 wagon with paperwork is a different thing.

Also worth noting, it’s listed on the thembmarket, so will have less eyes on it and more opportunity for those that are interested.

A 1967 Chevelle with a 454 and a four-speed should be an easy car for the market to figure out.

This one isn’t. The headline works. Big-block, manual, classic shape. But underneath that, it’s a different story. The VIN points to a six-cylinder Malibu, so everything that defines the car now, engine, transmission, even the SS look was added later. You’re not looking at a factory-built package, you’re looking at someone else’s version of one.

That shifts the entire question from what it is to how well it’s been done.

There’s clearly been effort here. The setup isn’t basic, and it reads like more than a casual swap. But the presentation doesn’t fully carry that same level of confidence. Small details start to stand out. Gauges that don’t work, minor cosmetic issues, unfinished touches inside, and even a simple request for a data plate photo that couldn’t be answered.

Individually, none of that is a dealbreaker. Together, it creates just enough uncertainty to slow people down.

And that’s where cars like this get stuck.

It doesn’t fit cleanly into any one category. It’s not original enough for someone chasing factory correctness, and it doesn’t present tightly enough to feel like a fully sorted build. What’s left is a car that people like in theory, but take longer to commit to in reality.

That doesn’t make it unappealing. It just makes it something you have to understand before you chase.

Toyota built 100 of these. Not 100,000. Not 1,000. One hundred, total, ever. None of them were sold in America new.

The backstory matters here. 1996, Toyota turns 60 years old as a car company. To mark it, they go back to the beginning, the Model AA, their first mass-produced car from 1936. They commission Toyota Technocraft, their in-house coachbuilder, to build a retro sedan in that spirit. Hilux underpinnings, 2.0-liter four-cylinder, rear-wheel drive, leather, woodgrain, Nardi wheel, a two-tone black and burgundy exterior that looks like it rolled out of a 1930s Chrysler showroom. They call it the Classic. They build exactly 100 and sell them only in Japan.

This one has 4,500 miles on it. It's been sitting at Duncan Imports in Christiansburg, Virginia, which if you follow the Japanese domestic market import world, you probably already know. The dealer has had it a couple of years and added minimal miles. Clean Tennessee title. One key. The only thing worth noting is 2013 date codes on the tires, which need to be dealt with regardless of how it looks.

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