Another really common question we get about the move is whether we’re bringing our cars with us when we move. TL;DR version: the government will ship one car for us, but we decided to sell both of our cars before we leave and buy something in Germany.
The important thing to understand about us and cars though is that while we own two cars, we usually only need one, and since we also dislike car payments, we have owned the same two cars for a very long time. In fact, I have owned our older car — a 1999 Honda Accord — since I bought it brand new in 1999.
The Accord has served me very well, but I bought it when I was young and dumb and didn’t quite understand how my lowly E-3 paycheck from the Air Force was going to work. I spent years regretting the decision to buy that car as I scrimped to make the car payments, and at a couple of particularly low points I even talked to a car dealership about trading the Accord for something cheaper, but in the end I was encouraged to suck it up because it was a much better car than anything else I could get. Eventually I just vowed to drive the damned car until the wheels fell off, but of course the Accord’s next joke on me was to last forever.
At 25 years old the car only has 170,000 miles on it and runs just fine. The AC hasn’t worked for years — a $5 gasket needed to be replaced to keep the fluid from running out, but they needed to pull the entire engine out of the car to get to it, which was going to cost at least $600 — so I never bothered to have it done. The heat quit working late last year, which is really annoying, but since we only drive it a few times a year, we haven’t even bothered to get a quote to get it fixed. Other than those two issues, there really isn’t anything wrong with it that we know of, and we use it when we need to.
However, I decided last summer that 25 years was probably long enough to get our money’s worth out of the car, so we started planning to replace it. In the meantime though, Chris got selected for the job in Germany, so instead of trading the Accord in for something new, we’re just going to sell it a few weeks before we get on a plane.
Which brings us to our other car - a 2009 Honda Element. We originally planned to bring the Element to Germany with us, but shortly after Chris got the job the Element had to go to the shop for a second expensive trip in 6 months. If we were staying in the states the Element would have been fine once we had a new car as a primary car and the Element as a back-up, but if it came to Germany the Element would continue to rack up miles and wear and tear. The other consideration was the German inspection, which we were increasingly worried that the Element wouldn’t be able to pass since the Germans take inspections very, very seriously. Plus, when you add in the fact that we would be looking for U.S.-spec Honda parts in Germany for a car Honda hasn’t even made in a few years and never sold in Europe, it seemed fairly likely that any future repairs would be even more expensive and time consuming. All of which led us to our current plan to sell the Element before we leave.
We considered buying a new U.S. car before we left for Germany, but all of the current U.S. folks working in Germany suggested waiting, since a U.S. warranty wouldn’t necessarily be honored by German dealerships. Plus, with no idea of where we will live or what the parking situation will be like, it made it difficult to figure out what we should buy, especially since several of the downtown apartments we have been considering have stacked parking spots in the garages, which comes with strict size and weight limits.
Therefore, the plan as it stands now is to purchase a German-spec car to use while we’re in Germany, which will be sold before we return. The advantage of this plan is we will have a car that should pass German inspections without a problem and will be set up for driving in Germany. We are also fairly confident that we will only need one car while we’re over there since public transportation is so good, which should make life a little easier. The big disadvantage of course is that when we return to the states we will almost certainly have to buy two cars at that point, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. (And for those who are curious, while it would be possible to bring the German-spec car back to the states, it is very, very expensive to do so, so it will make way more sense to just sell it in Germany.)