Buying a car in U.K. as a foreigner

Yes! We finally got our awesome car for our 10,000 miles epic roadtrip the Mongol Rally! It’s a 2005 SUZUKI ALTO, 1061cc Engine, NO Air-Conditioner, Auto Transmission.

We bought it for £1800 (around $3065 USD) online without test driving it! Wish us luck driving this tiny durian beast from London to Mongolia.

Here are some Q&A if you are interested in our process:

Where do you buy your car?
We use http://www.autotrader.co.uk/ and we bought it from a dealer. There are also other websites like GumTree (more like a U.K. craigslist) and U.K. Ebay.
Did you ask someone to test out the car before you bought it?
No. But we did an online background check on the car for £30.
When you purchased the car, how did you do about the registration?
For the registration, we give the dealership permission to send in the registration documents with Graham’s name and a U.K. address. A HUGE Thanks to Graham’s Sister in law’s cousins’ personal assistants letting us use their address! We pay an extra £250 (around $426 USD) to have the car delivered to their house. When we bought it our car already had MOT (emissions testing). We haven’t tax’d it yet, but we need that to legally drive it once we get there.
How about car insurance?
We bought our car insurance through HIC. It’s around £230 (around $391 USD) and it covers all Europe and Turkey for one month. There are also other insurance companies e.g. Clements and DU Insurance (for camper van…etc) 

Posted on June 23, 2014 in Mongol Rally

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