A New Car Indonesian Style

Rachel and I have been looking for a car to buy for quite a while. Car rental for a month is about $500 here which is pretty steep. Our plan was to buy a second hand car for around $5,000 and sell it for not too much less when we leave. I was interested in getting a 4WD car so I would be safer in the hills when looking for rivers and other adventure.

We didn’t have any money for quite a while but I spent a good deal of time looking around at cars. I probably looked at 5 or 6 quite seriously. After a while though I realized that for $5000 you just couldn’t buy a reasonable, i.e. something Rachel can drive, 4WD car. With that we reduced our requirements and ended up very quickly with a $4,000 1995 Suzuki Feroza. It has two front doors and a back door so is pretty small. I think the engine is a 1600cc and it pinks fairly badly at times. However it has good tyres, brakes and clearance and Abeng, who is a mechanic by trade, considers it a great vehicle and the price to be fair. We’ve a list of things to improve on it, important things like seatbelts in the back, roof rack on the top and reinstalling the spare wheel.

The actual transaction of buying a car here was hilarious. Insurance is a big priority for me but it seems impossible to get insurance that would cover someone elses car if I crashed into them. The philosophy is that if they have an expensive car then they will have insurance. If they don’t have an expensive car then it is cheap to fix it so we’ll just negotiate who pays. I haven’t yet resigned myself to having no insurance here but it could well end up there.

The next super weird thing is that everyone encouraged me not to change the name on the ownership papers even if to the name of a trusted friend if I can’t legally own it myself. The reasons were that it costs $70 to change them and more importantly it would fill up space in the ownership book. When that book is full they would issue a duplicate book which would immediately reduce the value of the vehicle. Everyone is pleased that it has a BL license plate which means that it is registered in Banda Aceh and things I need not worry about anything else. Abeng knows the guy who sold it to us and isn’t at all worried about him coming and claiming it is still his car. Needless to say I have several issues with all of this logic and may still change the ownership to my name!

The conversation where I was asking questions about ownership and insurance included a lot of me explaining my expectations from similar transactions/situations in NZ or the US and people telling me this was Indonesia and the system is different. I am not 100% a fan of Indonesian systems and this was borne out when the topic changed to talk of putting rearseat belts into the car (an absolute must for Rachel and I). Abeng said to us “we have a system here for that too, when you are dead you are dead, that is it!”. I invited him to discuss that philosophy about safety with my mother! I advised him to have a hankerchief ready too!

Expected resale for the car in a year’s time is about $3,500 or more if we make significant improvements. We may also upgrade if need demands and/or financial resources allow. Sounds like a good deal.

So there it is. We are mobile and going places.