It started as a feeling a few weeks into our trip to South America, we simply had enough of the “reliable” busses of Colombia and started looking for a camper for the rest of our journey.

Before you start looking into the ads you have to know, that in South America, every vehicle is allowed to be and to be sold in their home country, everywhere else you need to have a temporary import permit (TIP) – this is going to be important later – that allows you to travel with your vehicle in a foreign country for the purpose of tourism and the car cannot be more than 180 days in any given foreign country. With that said, it’s a good option to buy a car with the plate from a country where you wanna finish your trip.

In our case it was Chile. Luckily, we got the process description from one of the guys trying to sell us the car and we have confirmed it with a Chilean agency.

• Get a sponsor
• Obtain RUT
• Send all papers to your sponsor in Chile
• Get new documents from your sponsor
• Sign all documents at a Chilean embassy
• Send most of the documents to Chile
• Wait 5 weeks and print your own card.

Get a sponsor

No foreigner can buy a vehicle unless spoken for by a Chilean legal entity. If you are in Chile it can be your hostel receptionist or anyone you ask. If you are abroad it’s a little trickier. Unless you have a friend there, you can turn to agencies specialized in remote title transfer.

Getting your RUT

You need to be in a city that has a Chilean consulate (or an embassy). You need to make an official copy of your passport apostilled by the Chilean embassy and sign the documents for the agency getting you the RUT number, after that send them to the agency via DHL. So that they can obtain your RUT number. Now you wait for 7-8 days.

Sign a bunch of document at a Chilean embassy

Once you have your RUT number you are legally able to own a Chilean vehicle. With the freshly obtained RUT they send you 5 documents:

• Autorización – signed by the seller so you can drive the car until your documents arrived – 7$
• Declaración jurada – no one knows, but they ask for it sometimes – 5$
• Poder venta – the seller sells the car – 5$
• Poder compra – You buying the car – 5$
• Poder padrón – so that the agency can take the documents at the end – 5$

The ones in bold remain with you, the rest you send to Chile. If you are unlucky like me, the embassy administration lady decides to have only one padrón for you and you have to go back once again.

You think you’re ready, but not so fast

In theory you are the proud new owner of the vehicle, but sometimes officials don’t think so. Remember the TIP? Legally only the one who obtained the TIP can leave with the car and the Autorización you have apostilled should let you through the borders, but some office rats don’t accept it, so you are trying to convince an official in Spanish that you’d like to get the vehicle out of the country, them saying only the owner can, so the vehicle cannot stay but you can’t take it. Our solution was to try a different smaller border between Ecuador and Peru and it worked.