BBCThe small South Caucasus nation of Georgia has become a multi-billion dollar hub for the international used car market. The vehicles are mostly sourced from the US, and many appear to be ending up in Russia.
On the dusty outskirts of Rustavi, an industrial town 20km (12 miles) southeast of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, is a vast area of open-air carparks.
Equivalent in size to more than 40 football pitches, it hosts thousands of vehicles up for sale.
You can find pretty much any automobile your heart desires – Mercedes, Porsches, Jaguars, Toyotas and, more recently, Teslas. They are all here.
One of the largest carparks is owned by Caucasus Auto Import (CAI), a company that buys used cars from auctions in the US. The vehicles have often been so badly damaged in accidents that they have been written-off by American insurance firms.
CAI says that its “team of experts” in the States will pick up the cars in person, and then arrange their export by container ship, 10,000km (6,000 miles) to a port on Georgia’s Black Sea coastline. The damaged cars will then be fixed by Georgian mechanics.
“Our company has contributed a lot to the renewal of the Georgian fleet of cars,” says David Gulashvili, CAI’s deputy chief executive. “When we started our business in 2004, Georgian automotive infrastructure was totally Soviet Union produced, like [Soviet brands] Lada and Vaz.”
He says that his company has responded to “a lot…
