So after a very unnecessarily long and drawn out process recently I finally became an owner of a car, for the first time ever!
When we were looking at cards we tried dealers, we tried the Car market in a field on Sundays, we tried online ads; and once we'd finally worked out what we wanted (possibility of 7 seats for family members/friends, as well as off-road capable for all the rubbish roads and speed bumps that graze the bottom of regular cars), we found a few options. In the end we picked the one with the lowest mileage (that was hopefully not clocked) and that came from an owner directly, who seemed to really take care of his card (rather than from a dealer).
Though there is one or two car assembly plants in Kenya, 98% of all vehicles are imported, and of them at least two thirds from Japan, second-hand. There is a whole industry involved in importing the cars, and it means most cars are at least 6 and often up to 10 years old when people buy them in Kenya, even though their mileage and condition is very good, having been refurbished in Japan, and presumably bought from buyers who didn't do a lot of mileage in them. As we were advised - buy Japanese since there are more local mechanics who can fix/service them and then resell values are higher. In fact since "new" cars are already second-hand reselling a car third-hand will only lose about 20% of the value of the car's second-hand price (unless the car is in a very bad state of course), which was one of the reasons we thought we'd buy a more expensive car rather than a cheaper car (we'll obviously get most of the money back later upon sale anyway).
It's done very well so far, after a good 6 months, with some damage from some national park game drives that was fixable (scrapes underneath the car) and we've quickly adjusted to the life of driving everywhere, rather than public transport, bikes, or taxis as with the previous decade or so. With a DVD player in the multimedia console the kids are happy with driving and sometimes even want to stay in the car longer! Kenya is very car-friendly in the sense of restaurants and offices having plenty of parking; and even downtown there are a few convenient car parks, if one is willing to pay. The quality of the roads is another story of course, but in general they are not too bad, with just some exceptions: the biggest frustration is long-distance driving due to the lack of roads that are more than single lane each way (and the large number of slow moving trucks), and the tendency to use speed bumps all the time to slow cars down when passing through towns, which is frequently. Average speeds of 40 miles per hour are the norm and often optimistic.
Anyway, once we'd chosen the car and paid for it, we then had to get the insurance and transfer the car to me... but without a work permit this can't be done, so we put the insurance in someone else's name temporarily and hoped to switch it (and the car's ownership) over to my name later on. However, getting the work permit is only the first step to getting a residence card, and then a PIN number from the tax authority. And unfortunately the PIN number database didn't talk to the transport authority's database until I finally found someone who was helpful and friendly in the authority to sort it out.
Initially the seller had signed the car transfer documents, but paper documents are so 2016, and when we tried to submit them (after getting the PIN sorted out) we were told that it is online only nowadays... well fair enough, except the seller suggested we ask his friend who worked for the transport authority to do it for us, which never happened (due to laziness, unresponsiveness, funerals, requests for money, and all sorts of other excuses), so in the end after wasting a month or two, we just got the seller to do it directly and a couple of weeks later (once he found time) all is done -and the car insurance can also be changed to my name.
It was frustrating but it's sorted.
