Thursday afternoon I picked up our set of wheels. We had gone without for quite some time, but the last three weeks I’ve had the use of my boss’s other car and it’s just way too convenient to have your own vehicle.
I originally thought I’d go through a dealer, but the right second-hand Prado came up at the right price so we saved ourselves some money. This meant we didn’t have to deal with bank loans with lots of interest so it suited us right now.
The whole experience was more pleasant than my experiences in Australia. Over there I always felt like I was getting screwed. Here, the prices are generally so much cheaper it’s hard to see any of the cars as a bad deal.
We went for a 2006 Toyota VX Prado. It’s a V6 with a 4.0 litre engine, but with petrol so cheap it didn’t phase me. I’ve seen a similar vehicle perform amazingly on the dunes. In fact, one guy mentioned the only car here that does better is the same vehicle in the short wheel base. I can’t wait to take it out.
A guy named George from Egypt sold it to me. It was his wife’s car.
The Sharia Law is a major advantage to buying a car in Dubai. This means there is no way to buy a stolen car, or car with any existing finance or fines owing. Well, it would have been a total comfort at the time if I had understood some of the process. The whole thing was in other languages. My seller’s Public Relations Officer (PRO) was speaking Arabic, all the forms I filled out were Arabic, and when the RTA folks did converse with me in English I mostly needed the PRO to translate anyway.
I did what I could and just matched my name to my license number to the car’s registration number, and so on. I probably wouldn’t be too surprised if George drops in to take one of my kids away as a result of the forms. Or alternatively leave me with a whole brood of his kids.
Unfortunately the car has never been serviced in its 52,000km life. Almost ironically the inside still has some of the protective plastic on the duco, so it’s at least been partly looked after well.
Just like every other time I’ve bought a new car I notice only after I buy it that there are a billion other ones on the road. We’ll need to be on our toes when we park at shopping centres, cause there’ll usually be a dozen other models exactly the same.
The price of home and contents insurance here is cheap as chips. But for automobiles it’s a hell of a lot dearer. And with good cause. Less than three days after getting the car we had our first traffic incident. On a routine trip to Deira City Centre (shopping centre), we were stuck in quite a bit of traffic. Nobody was going anywhere, yet as we sat there I heard a bump next to me, and low and behold a police car had hit my mirror as he tried to struggle through the traffic! It was at very slow speed so there was no damage, except to maybe the police man’s ego. He looked a bit embarassed by the incident. An added plus was his mirror was folded back, where as ours was proudly unaffected.