Spain → Switzerland road freight, dual customs handled
Switzerland is the one lane on this site where the truck still stops at a real border. The line-haul leaves Castellar del Vallès on the AP-7, crosses into France at La Jonquera and enters Switzerland at Bardonnex, on the Geneva ring — the two crossings this corridor declares — and the road itself is measured rather than estimated: 1,050 km to Spreitenbach in the Baden district on a 40-tonne truck profile, about 15 hours of driving at an average of 70 km/h. The three hubs are not interchangeable. Zurich is the largest consumer market and the industrial belt around Oerlikon. Basel is the pharmaceutical and chemical cluster — Roche, Novartis, Syngenta — and it is where most of the ADR on this lane originates. Geneva is watchmaking, fashion retail and the supply chain of the international organisations. Bern, Lucerne and the smaller cantons are delivered inland, and Ticino, the Jura and Vaud are confirmed at booking instead of assumed.
Two declarations, never one. The Spanish export declaration is filed through a licensed customs broker we instruct; Swiss import clearance is carried out at the border by our authorised Swiss broker partners, not by SAVA directly. Import VAT is Swiss MwSt at 8.1 % and your consignee pays it as importer of record, unless you ask us to price DDP and the broker advances it against our invoice. One point is worth settling before the file is opened: since 1 January 2024 Switzerland has removed the import duty on industrial goods, chapters 25 to 97, so a EUR.1 is no longer automatic — and it is not obsolete either. Your consignee still needs one if they intend to re-export the goods to a free-trade partner and issue proof of origin on that export. Tell us which of the two cases you are in and the export is filed accordingly.
A Swiss rate sits above a comparable intra-EU one for reasons that are structural rather than a surcharge, and three of them exist on no intra-EU lane at all. Two customs declarations per consignment instead of none. The LSVA, a per-kilometre heavy-vehicle charge levied per truck over 3.5 t regardless of how full it runs, which on a full trailer is absorbed into one price and on groupage is apportioned across the consignments aboard. And a calendar that removes the whole of Sunday and every night from 22:00 to 05:00 at that same 3.5 t threshold, so a Swiss plan holds fewer usable hours than a French or German one of the same length. Groupage still starts at 2 LDM and the lane takes up to 6 loading metres per consignment; above that a dedicated trailer is normally cheaper and we will say so rather than force the consolidation. 2 LDM billed, or 0.4 LDM for Romania; pallets below 500 kg are accepted with the applicable minimum charge.
