The 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 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.
Containers shipment
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 of demand for Western-produced vehicles”. Today the firm has 600 employees.
Last year, Georgia imported $3.1bn (£2.4bn) worth of cars, according to official figures. It then exported vehicles to a value of $2.1bn, mainly to former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Cars are in fact Georgia’s second-largest export by value, after copper ore.
Across the huge car market in Rustavi, curious customers are on the lookout for a deal. Each car has a card on the inside of its windscreen indicating price, engine size, and date of manufacture. Alisher Tezikbayev has travelled here from Kazakhstan. He and a group of his friends are exploring the Toyota section.
“We’ve been re-exporting cars from Georgia for about 3.5 years. We send cars to Kazakhstan and organise auto tours, when clients come to Georgia to pick their own car,” says Mr Tezikbayev, who is posting videos to his 100k followers on Tik Tok. Georgia used to export second-hand US and European cars to its northern neighbour Russia, with whom it shares a border. But that has officially stopped as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Western sanctions
In September 2023, the Georgian Revenue Service announced that, in line with the then latest Western sanctions against Russia, it was restricting the re-export and transit of automobiles imported from the US or Europe to Russia and Belarus. And Georgian officials have long denied that the country has been complicit in aiding Russia’s evasion of the trade embargoes.
Yet a recent investigation by Georgian media publication Ifacti showed numerous loopholes exploited by an army of car dealers on both sides of the Russian-Georgian border.
David Gulashvili says that his company no longer has any trade with Russia. “From day one of the war we have restricted any kind of transactions from Russia, any kind of exports to Russia. You will not see a single car exported by Caucasus Auto Import to Russia.” However, he adds that there is no existing mechanism to monitor the final destination for re-exported cars going to other countries.
