When you enter a car rally, any car rally in fact, the most important item after the team itself is of course, a car. Which we, at this point, didn’t have. So once more, we turn to our good friend and the
answerer of all our questions, the internet. And the three of us set about
scouring eBay and Auto Trader online to see if we can hunt us down a car that
isn’t that good at the task of taking us to Tescos, let alone Ulan Bataar.
 |
| Too old. |
Then the organisers deliver a bit of a blow to the one single carefully laid plan we have. It seems their friends in the Mongolian government have finally tired of receiving cars that were at the end of their useful lives when leaving Western Europe and which, by the time the best of the bunch somehow stumble their way into their capital city, are to put it lightly, ‘a bit knackered’.
Because of this, the Mongolians set out a new rule
for our Adventurist overlords. “Sorry lads, no more shit heaps older than 10
years old. Don’t worry though, we’ll still let in the older shit heaps, but
you’ll have to pay a huge deposit and either drive that piece of crap home
again or ship it out.”
This kind of reduces our options a bit. Having set
ourselves a £750 absolute maximum budget for the purchase of a car, this puts
10 year old Suzuki and Daihatsu 4x4’s well out of our price range by as much
again. And our Panda option is disqualified due to the fact that the
inconsiderate bastards at Fiat stopped making the things in 1994. And besides, whilst driving home wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, none of us has the time available, let alone
the money to pay for that stupidly big deposit.
So it's back to square one then.
The Adventurists respond by understandably raising
the old 1000cc limit to 1200 to try & give people more chance to find
suitably cheap vehicles, but despite the issues presented by the new rule we do
what we usually do when faced with adversity. We make life even harder for
ourselves by obstinately deciding we’re going ‘old school’ on this bad boy and
we’re going to get something 1000cc or less if we can. After all, that was the
rule when we entered.
We persevere and one search of eBay reveals a
Daihatsu Terios 4x4 up in the wilds of North East England which is ‘new’ enough
and its price could possibly fall inside our budget. So with this in mind, we
watch it very closely. Sadly, too closely it turns out in Paul’s case. And
after a Thursday night down the football club sinking lager tops, he stumbles
in pissed, goes online and sets about triggering a bidding war on the vehicle.
By the time he’s done, the price for the Terios is almost above our budget. So much for sneaking in and sniping it at the last minute!
 |
| Outbid. Cheers Chalmers! |
Despite deciding to push our pot to £800 in an attempt to try & get what we want, we eventually lose out on this fine example of Japanese engineering thanks to a combination of being outbid and a shit wireless connection in the Tower Hill branch of Wetherspoons that Saturday afternoon. Trust me, you really don’t want to know the details.
To ensure such incidents aren’t repeated, as founder
members of ‘This Khan Only End Badly’, Gareth & I take an executive
decision that from now on Paul is not to be involved in the actual purchasing
process. At all. And so back to the internet we go.
A couple of more weeks worth of trawling things like
eBay’s motoring section eventually reveals 2 more promising options. I find a
red-ish coloured Vauxhall Agila. It’s a small people carrier type thing mostly
driven by people aged 65+ which has a one litre engine and basically being a
re-badged Suzuki, it comes with that tried & tested Japanese reliability.
Plus being a practical sort, it has a fair bit of space for all the crap we’ll
undoubtedly take with us on the trip.
Gareth on the other hand has unearthed something
truly special. A bright red Perodua Nippa. And with an 850cc 3 cylinder engine
under the bonnet, it’s got Mongol Rally written all over it. However, the
downside of it being a town car is that it has sod all boot space. That and
we haven't the foggiest idea what the fuck a ‘Perodua’ actually is.
It transpires that the two auctions end on the same
day a couple of hours apart on a Sunday. And being the resident eBayer, I get
tasked with the crucial job of trying to bag one of these little beauties. We
all agree that as the Agila auction finishes first, this will be our first
option with the Perodua as our contingency. After monitoring the situation for
most of the week, our day of reckoning arrives. Full of Sunday dinner and
happily supping a cuppa to aid another slowly dissipating hangover, I plonk
myself in front of my PC intent on getting us a sweet sweet ride to cruise
‘east side’ in.
Everything goes without a hitch and using my well
practised last second bidding technique honed over many years of being a total
bastard on the worlds most popular internet auction site, I manage to wind up
being the highest bidder on our number one choice, the Vauxhall. I am
victorious!
Annoyingly though, as always with us, there’s a bit of a snag. The
bloke selling the Agila has placed a reserve on the car and despite being the
highest bidder with £500, I’ve not managed to meet his expected valuation. This
means I might have a car. And then again I might not.
I email the seller to find out what the score is,
but instead turn my attention to our back up option. The Perodua. After a brief
conflab, Gareth and I conclude that we really should consider the Vauxhall
option dead and that there’s no point missing out on a perfectly good car
waiting for Mr Vauxhall to mail me back when he might tell me to go fuck myself
as I’ve bid nowhere near what he thinks the car is worth.
This time, things are a little more competitive. It
would seem that Perodua’s are a sought after marque! My customary late strike
is countered but fortunately my opponent has retaliated too soon and I calmly
fire off a last second bid of £530 that wins me the auction. And with that, we
find ourselves the proud owners of a red W registration Perodua Nippa, with
almost 52,000 miles on the clock.
 |
| 'Reserve not met' |
“Who’s your Daddy?” I enquire of absolutely no one before deciding I had best check in with the rest of the team and let them know the good news.
“So we got the second one then?” enquires Gareth. I
confirm that the car he’d located is now ours and that I’ll be in touch with
our seller first thing tomorrow about going to pick it up.
“One more thing before I go” enquires my team mate
“what exactly have we bought again?”
“It’s called a Perodua mate. I’ve Googled ‘em and
it’s basically a Daihatsu that Daihatsu didn’t want to make any more and some
Malaysian blokes did”.
“A Pre-od-ora?”
“No. A Perodua”
“A Por-eda-ror?”
“Noooo. A Peh-roh-dua”
And so it continues for several minutes, before I
admit defeat and break off Gareth’s lesson in how to pronounce the name of
Malaysia’s second largest car manufacturer (apparently!) to call Paul. “We’ve got
a car Chalmers!”
“Is it the Vauxhall? Or did we get the Po-re…erm,
the other one?”
“It’s the Perodua”
“Pee-rud-uh?”
Oh for fucks sake.
Still, it’s something that we’ll have to get used
to. Because for the next 6 months, every time the golden question “What car are
you taking?” is asked, we go through much the same exchange as above.
You see, the reason for this is simple. No one has
ever heard of Perodua. No one. And I’m guessing that includes you no doubt.
Unless of course you live & work in Kuala Lumpur, then you’ve probably
learned to drive in one, got 2 on the driveway and was in one as your cab back
from the pub Saturday night.
As you may have guessed from the conversation
covered above, Perodua is a Malaysian manufacturer mostly taking ‘obsolete’
Daihatsu based models, shifting all the tooling to Malaysia and turning them out in their thousands after putting their own little touches to them.
 |
| 847cc of fierce power! |
Despite the fact you or we had never heard of them this basic little motor, old as the ‘Kancil’ in Malaysia, has proved a hit in its adopted homeland, selling over a quarter of a million of the things and filling all sorts of roles from Taxi to Police car. No doubt because of this success, Perodua got all confident, branched out and brought the Kancil to Europe. Which is how our little chap made his way here in the UK, where it was branded the ‘Nippa’ and when first released had the distinction of being the cheapest new car you could buy on the market at just under four and a half thousand pounds. In fact, so cheap was it, that a radio was an optional extra.
So as you can see, we’ve gone for somewhat proven albeit
really very very cheap, technology.
Oh don’t look at me like that, what could possibly
go wrong?
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