To be road legal for the UK requires, among other things, that the speedometer must read in miles per hour and that the vehicle complies with emission regulations.The most common way for second-hand cars to be imported is via the European Community. A personal import is a car which has been used by the buyer in a country outside the UK. This procedure is commonly used by grey importers to avoid the government’s quota of just 50 models. So what is the truth?A grey import is a vehicle that was not built for sale within the European Union. In practice it has not met European Type Approval regulations for safety and emissions. There have been stories about the problems of getting parts, the differing specifications, safety implications and sky-high insurance premiums.
A recent high-profile court case concerned a grey importer who had rebadged a Toyota Soarer as a more prestigious Lexus, which is practically what Toyota do on exports to America anyway.

The successful prosecution led Graham Smith, managing director of Toyota GB, to say: “We welcome increased consumer choice, but buyers must be extremely wary when considering a grey import for many reasons, including safety and higher insurance costs.”By definition, dealers in such cars are not part of a manufacturer’s authorised dealer network system and cannot offer the reassurance of warranties, after-sales back-up or even, it seems, a truthful description of what the car is. The facts are that Japanese market cars are cheaper than UK models and better equipped. Not everyone has been happy about this trend, particulary the official importers. Certainly the forecourts of Britain have been turning Japanese. A glance at the number of advertisements for specialist grey import dealers multiplies every day.

Experian Car Data Check claims that the number on UK roads now exceeds 500,000. In the past 12 months, the number of “grey”, or unofficial imports from the Far East, has turned into a positive deluge. JUST IN case you hadn’t noticed, the new and used car market has gone rather grey recently. The trips he describes here were pleasure, not business, and at his own expense (apart from a bit of help from the English Speaking Union and Bradford City Council for the first one).. If you win, you win; if you lose, you’re still in the world’s greatest city, you don’t really need 160 channels or six phones and you can certainly get by without the white-gloved lift attendant.Roger Mosey is controller of Radio 5 Live. My god-daughter’s family cashed some airline miles for a “luxury” weekend in New York and found all five of them shoe-horned into one below-average size room in Midtown; and even if you fill in your VIP preference card as a fan of suites on the 50th floor you can still end up in a cubby-hole on a low, dark corridor next to the lifts But the joy of New York is it doesn’t really matter.

Short of coming up with the dosh, it’s probably a combination of luck; not frightening the reservations personnel; and a track-record of loyalty to a particular hotel brand.Of course, the game with plastic cards and points has its limits. It was for a special occasion and the price of the suite would have been well into four figures at anything other than the lowest of the low season How do you guarantee you get it? You can’t. I could have done without the uniformed lift attendant in his white gloves, but overall it was incredibly comfortable and unintimidating.Was it cheap? No, though in a city where the average room rate is now $200 a night, I was still paying “only” $279 plus tax Was it good value? Unquestionably, yes. There were four televisions, six phones, a fax machine and two computer ports; and the floor was so highly polished that you ran a risk of personal injury if you walked on it in your socks. It was on the 31st floor, with windows looking west, north and east.

At the risk of sounding like an over-excited teenager from Bradford, the suite comprised: two large bedrooms with triple-size beds; two marble bathrooms; a dressing area; a gallery kitchen; and a living room with a dining table, a fireplace, two sofas and an array of easy chairs. A plaque marks distinguished former residents, ranging from Herbert Hoover to Madeline Albright; but the word “upgrade” can also be whispered within its distinguished portals. On a holiday at the end of last year I’d booked two standard rooms with the backing of a Hilton loyalty card, but the clerk at check-in offered to consolidate them into a suite.It would have been ill-advised to have said “no” and stormed out. But I did end up in a suite at the Waldorf Towers, and it was the best return so far for a comparatively small investment.The Waldorf Astoria is a massive hotel, part of the Hilton Group, on Park Lane; and the Towers’ wing has a private entrance down the side. I’ve never stayed in the Four Seasons because it starts at stratospheric price levels; and I wouldn’t want to stay at The Plaza because it deserves to be punished for the amount of product placement in bad movies.