New Car part 1

Do I really need a car? Probably not. I can get to work on the MRT. It takes a while, mostly because the Kaohsiung MRT is pretty limited and I have to take two separate lines. But it is possible. I can walk to the grocery store or Costco, though it would be easier to carry more crap home with a car, especially from Costco. I cannot get to my hospital on the MRT. That requires a 45 minute ride on two buses. A car would get me there in 20 minutes. But it's not like I go to the hospital every day. I can get to pretty much everything else with an MRT/bus combo.

With a car, I could explore beyond central Kaohsiung. The city is actually pretty big, and nowhere near downtown. Half of Kaohsiung is mountains and a national park. That is one thing it has in common with Hong Kong. Most people only think of the big city part, but there are large chunks of nature without a single skyscraper.

Then there is what lies beyond Kaohsiung. The high speed train quickly goes to Tainan and all the large cities north, but if I want to go south or east, the best option is by car. There are buses to Kenting, but they cannot compete with an independent exploration by car. I could always rent a car whenever I want to head out, but I am new to this part of the world. It might be cheaper to buy a car than rent every time I want to roam. Five years from now, I might not care, and I would be stuck with a car that I only use to go places in the city, but I can live with that.

Cars are not cheap. I recently moved to a new country, put a deposit on a new apartment, bought new appliances and bought several components of a new stereo system. All of those things cost money. The apartment is in everyone's name and we split the bills. We also bought the appliances together since we will all be using them more or less equally. The car is in my name and I paid for every inch of it. One roommate currently has no job and the other can easily get to work on the MRT. I'm the only one who has much use for a car. Also, it turns out that you cannot buy a car in more than one name unless both names are married.

I did the math. If I take the MRT five days a week for the next 60 years, I will spend as much money as a new Toyota. Clearly, riding the MRT is cheaper than buying a car. I think I'm paying more for the convenience than the transportation. If you include gas and insurance, the MRT is simply the smarter move. And if it went everywhere the way metro systems in cities like Hong Kong, Paris, and New York do, I would not bother with a car. Also, parking is impossible in Hong Kong, Paris and New York. It gets a little easier in Kaohsiung.

The first decision you have to make when buying a car is new or used. People have a lot of strong opinions about either choice. I don't care about status or keeping up with the Chens, and I like how much cheaper used cars are, but I am in a largely unfamiliar country. This is not the place where I want to get ripped off by someone as honest as a politician. I am not entirely sure what my options are in the event of buying snake oil. I also have no mechanics that I trust anywhere within a 7,000 mile radius. Any maintenance issues with a new car can be brought to the dealer who sold it. Most dealers include standard maintenance for a few years, but only with new cars. Insurance is actually cheaper with new cars. I assume because someone with a new car might be more cautious than someone driving a piece of crap, but there is probably a more convoluted bureaucratic reason. It is also worth noting that it gets rather hot in Kaohsiung and there are more than a few mountains nearby. A newer car is less likely to overheat going uphill and more likely to have reliable air conditioning.

Shopping for a car in Taiwan was an interesting experience. I helped a friend shop for a car in China last year, making it easy to compare the two different countries. Like China, Taiwan is not known for its automobile industry. Far more cars are made in Taiwan, but most of those companies are based in Japan. The biggest difference is in the type of cars. Hong Kong has a surprising number of British luxury cars. I used to see Bentleys and Jaguars on the road all the time. Taiwan is more Mercedes and BMW. There is a Bentley and a Jaguar dealership right next to each other in Kaohsiung, but I have never seen either car on the road. There seems to be less variety in Taiwan, with most of the cars looking relatively the same. Sedans all look like Toyota Vios, Mitsubishi Grunder and Mazda Isamu, with plenty of Mitsubishi Savrin and Toyota Sienta vans, and a lot of Honda SUVs.

Unlike China, I did not need an appointment to test drive anything. I just walked in and picked out whatever I wanted. Everything available was parked out back, while the cars at the Hong Kong dealers were in some garage off site. As with China, we were two women car shopping and no men. In Hong Kong, we were Chinese and American. In Taiwan, we were Canadian and American. I don't know if that made a difference, or if it was just another disconnection between China and Taiwan, but as two obvious foreigners, we never had any issues with any salesmen trying to get us to follow Chinese tradition. As long as I could produce a Taiwan driver's license, which was required to test drive anything, they were happy to make their sales pitch. We also got none of the condescending bullshit from any salesmen in Taiwan. I can't confirm that Taiwan is less misogynistic than China, but I was told that most Taiwanese know next to nothing about vehicle maintenance. They still thought it was strange that I wanted to look under hoods, but I think it was less about my gender and more about how seldom anyone around here looks under the hood when they test drive a car.

I test drove a Toyota Corolla and Honda Jazz in Hong Kong, and was not especially impressed with either. Honda in Taiwan is mostly SUVs. I don't see the benefit of driving a small truck here. Most of the parking spaces are tiny and you can barely squeeze a sedan car in between the scooters and oncoming traffic on the smaller roads.

Mazda was also mostly SUVs, but they had a couple of normal cars. The Mazda 2 had one of those tiny back windows that you can barely see out of while backing up. I reject those outright. The Mazda 6 is their standard sedan. I took it for a test drive, and while there was nothing particularly wrong with it, there was also nothing interesting about it. Every new sedan on sale in Taiwan currently has all the latest bells and whistles, and most of them tend to look the same, so the only real difference between one and the other is how they feel. The Mazda 6 felt like a rental car that I would not mind driving around for a while, but I would not want to own. Since I always assumed I would end up getting a Toyota, I looked at all the other cars as practice.

During my month of shopping, I rented a car, mostly to get a feel for the streets of Kaohsiung. I felt that if I was going to buy a new car in a new city in a new country, I should at least have some experience with the local traffic. The rental car was a Nissan Sentra, so I never had to test drive anything at the nearest Nissan dealer. I found the Sentra comfortable enough, but it was much weaker than the Mazda 6. I liked how high the seats were. A lot of modern cars want the driver as close to the ground as possible, maybe because it makes people think they are in a sports car, but sitting a little higher up gives you more visibility. That is one thing SUV drivers always brag about. The Sentra seats were not nearly as high as an SUV, but it felt higher than most sedans without the bulk of a truck.