Car? ...What Car?

We are currently struggling to find a suitably rubbish car for our adventure, although it sounds really easy to buy a car and drive to Mongolia its actually not really! The trouble is, the Mongol government will only allow cars across its borders if they are less than 10 years old, as they are trying to discourage people from dumping old heaps in their country - therefore in resent years the Mongol government have slapped an import tax on all vehicles, this is up near US$6000 for a car that's over 10 years old!  Which means we will have to settle for a Jan 2003 or newer car, which obviously means spending more money on it!  It's not too bad when you think that we will be splitting the costs by four people but at the end of the race, presuming we make it to Ulaanbaatar - we will be auctioning it off (or what is left of it) and donating the proceeds to charity.

Another tough thing to bear in mind whilst selecting a car that you want to drive 14,000 miles 1/3 of the way around the planet, across deserts, rivers and mountains - is, not if - but when we break it - can we get spare parts? Can we bodge it back together again?  Cars that would usually be considered reliable and cheap in the UK are not necessarily cheap and easy to fix in central Asia.  Most European manufacturers don't have a large customer in central Asia and trying to find a Ford dealership in Siberia could come as quite a challenge!  We narrowed our search to a Japanese on Korean manufacturer which only really left us with Honda, Toyota, Kia or Suzuki - of which we had to select a model, the rally rules state that the engine must be 1.2L or smaller - in order to keep an already ridiculous challenge "more challenging"!

Out of the choices left we have decided on a couple of models and now frantically trying to buy something before the deadline for registration which is only about 4 weeks away!