There are many little annoyances about living in Singapore. Most of it people I think have learned to live with, but there’s a couple that really gets their goats. One of these is the price of car ownership, and the dreaded escalating prices of Certificates of Entitlement. The government here of course has been encouraging to make use of public transportation, but that’s – frankly – a non-starter for families with young kids like ours, nor does it help persuade current car owners to switch when the national transportation system has been experiencing unusually frequent occurrences of breakdowns of late.
Our almost 8 year old Nissan Latio has served us very well over the years now, and incredibly, aside from a minor scrape we got into on the first year, has not experienced a single other vehicular accident since then. OK; the car emitted white smoke one occasion 4 years ago while trying to get up the steep ramp leading into the Compass Point carpark, but that seemed to get rectified through servicing. The common opinion here also is that once your car is about the eighth year and you’re certain you are gonna continuing needing a car, you’ll need to seriously plan to get a replacement well-before the car hits the 10 year mark.
Unlike many other Singaporean men though, I (personally) have little interest in cars as toys and gadgets – not certainly to the same degree of enthusiasm I have with say photography or mobile computing. Cars for the both of us are essentially functional objects that will get us from one point to another and safely, and aside from the most obvious and basic of requirements – like fuel consumption, cost of maintenance, engine capacity, passenger space, body color, and price – we don’t really have any preference on the other aspects of the ride. We did especially like the keyless entry and ignition features on the Latio, and the unusually generous headroom and legspace in the cabin. The former seems to be a pretty common feature these days in family sedans – so here’s hoping that the new car will also have similarly spacious interior space.
As with just about everything I do and buy today, I fired up Excel and created columns for the above requirements. And within the budget of what we were willing to spend on it, our choices seem to be just one of a few models:
Nissan Almera/Latio or Nissan Sylphy
Kia Forte K3
Toyota Corolla Altis
Time to start making time too to schedule visits to the carshow rooms to see and experience the cars in-person too.
The difficulty in our New Car Project 2015 is finally though how much more expensive car ownership is now in 2015 compared to 2007, with our projected expenditure to be about 160% what we spent back then for about the same type of car. Outright scary.
More to follow soon.
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