T-5 days to the Mongol Rally, and we’ve got no car!!!

This is Harriet, a 2000 Nissan Micra, at the seedy dealership in Kent from where we bought her last month on the Internet. The dealer claims the car registration papers got lost in mail. The DVLA (U.K version of DMV/RTO – just as bureaucratic and slow) said it would take them 6 weeks to send us a new registration certificate! Rally starts in 5 days.

The dealer brought in various dodgy sounding claimants who claimed they’ve driven all over Europe with Temporary Registration papers. Not wanting to prove to EVERY border security person that the car we’re driving is not a stolen one, we decided to buy another car. Yep, you read that right, find & buy another beat-up/old car. The DVLA claims we could get legit papers within 5 days, if the sale is registered online (with original papers that the dealer “lost”), so we’re going to buy a new car today/tomorrow, register online, and hope that the papers for the new car arrives before rally begins.

Now there’s a small matter of selling this car (which we’ve paid £620). We’ll have to wait for 6 weeks for papers to arrive, return to U.K, find a buyer, and meanwhile, store the car some place. With the easiest option being selling it back to the dealer we bought it from, we started negotiating with him. Having clearly understood the advantage he held, the dealer claimed the car lost value (just sitting in his lot, untouched), and that he had to re-MOT it, and clean it, and advertise it etc etc. and so he could only give us 100 quid! Not having been born yesterday, clearly knowing his re-MOT claim and lost value claim was bogus, and yet clearly knowing that it was better to sell it back at a loss than hold on to the car for 6 more weeks, we finally got £200 out of him and hightailed it out of there.

So T-5 days to rally, and no car!!!

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