I had this published in a local paper a few months after I got my car. It is a bit long but it may help the intending buyer.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverge in a wood, and I -
I took the road less traveled by
And that has made all the difference"
"The Road Not Taken" the title of a poem by Robert Frost. It is about the difficulties of choice and the rewards that may accrue following one's beliefs and convictions. A path though potentially fraught with loneliness, it nevertheless may fulfill like no other. In this oblique way I ease in to this theme. To most people who own one, a car is a means to an end. A mundane tool. A way of getting to work on time and given to the wrong mechanic, a source of unending sorrow.
To those people who fall into this category, I am sure that they will have something they are passionate about. Football perhaps or loud and ostentatious street parties. But here in Lagos, if you look you will find a few people who see cars as an end in its self.
I speak not of the "hey look at me I got a shiny new car" people but those who view cars in a deeper almost reverential way. They enthuse...they enthuse about the way it sounds, is it a deep bellow or a snarling rasp? The way it delivers it's power, in sharp spurts like a constricted hosepipe or sinuous unrelenting urge like a river bursting forth from its source. Even its appearance though with this there is rarely wide consensus. Take the hideous abomination that is the Toyota Echo. A car that must have been designed by a visually impaired and hearing challenged person. Blind to its unremitting ugliness and deaf to the howls of pain it extracts from innocent onlookers.
By far the most common reason for becoming a car enthusiast in my view is acceleration. Not top speed. That is largely academic given our roads, but as my old physics master Mr. Chuntai used to define it: Acceleration, The rate of change of distance with time. This is all the reason you need for buying, owning and loving a fast car. It is unexplainable, if you have not experienced you will not understand but if you have, Welcome take a seat.
I have followed this quest for a long time but unfortunately for me my quest has for a time been tempered by a fundamental imbalance in means. I had had to make do with cars more suited to commercial pursuits like the Renault 18ts I once briefly owned. A car that would go fast only if gravity was deeply involved! I wanted a fast car and knowing I would not find one here in Nigeria, I made up my mind early that I would have to buy it myself abroad. On this journey, I would be faced with these problems, what car to buy, where to buy it and how to get it here, to Lagos.
If for reasons of potential saving or unavailability you decide to buy a car abroad, it is important to take note of the following:
Do your research. What type of car do you want? Where will it be found cheapest? What are its common faults? Remember you will be buying this car yourself. The Internet is bursting with sites offering helpful information.
Unless you are traveling abroad anyway, you will need to add the cost of the trip to that of the car and compare it with the equivalent in Lagos- if it is available. The car needs to cost about N 1, 500,000 in Lagos for you to travel for this reason alone.
I advise you restrict yourself to franchised dealers. They may offer marginally dearer cars but these are much better examples.
Make a shortlist of cars you are interested in and note their location; this becomes especially important in the larger European countries.
Details like shipper and transport to the port of export are best prearranged to ensure prompt shipping.
There were two cars at the top of my list, a 1989-1993 Mercedes 500E and a BMW M5. I considered and discarded the Mercedes 500E for the following reasons.
It was an automatic
It would only go fast in a straight line. I would pay more import duty on it over a similar priced BMW . To be fair the 500E never had a chance. I had always liked the BMW e34 M5. With only about 13000 hand-assembled cars, there are two main models, built between 1988 and 1995, the 3.6 and 3.8 developing 315bhp and 340bhp respectively.
I had to have a 340bhp model in Daytona Violet- that's purple to everyone else. 340bhp, that is about twice the engine power of a 1991 Mercedes 300E to put it in perspective. And since it is a German car it only made sense to look for it in Germany.
There is a very helpful website
www.mobile.de where you will find a large listing of virtually any type of car offered for sale in Europe. After poring through its offerings in the M5 category I made a list of possibles. I toyed briefly with the idea having a friend make the purchase but this would only work if you can find someone knowledgeable about the particular car or if it's a more "normal" car. This would not work in my case.
Months passed. In the course of work, I had to make a trip out into Europe for "CeBit" a Technology fair in Hanover, Germany. Like most things in life, its all about time and chance. I dusted up my list of possible M5s and started calling their owners. Not surprisingly most of the ones I had earlier penciled down had been sold.
My partner and I were going to be in Germany for about a week so I had my work cut out for me. As soon as we got into Germany, I bought a sim card for my phone, which I took along. This is much cheaper than roaming your Nigerian phone. I could now call my new list of possibles. Trolling through this list it dawned on me that there were not that many good cars about and more importantly it was a big country.
There were examples that seemed promising but where as far away from where I was staying as Kano is from Lagos and so were not viable options for my purposes. In between developing new and existing business at the Hanover fair I traversed the countryside looking for my M5.
Finding none, I was losing hope. Finally, two days before we were to leave, I found it! I found my M5, in a small dealership in a town called Osterholz-Shembeck. A town as foreign to me as the name sounds..It was about 150 kilometers from where I was staying, a smaller town called Bad-Salzuflen.
Undaunted, (I had decided earlier only to buy from a dealer because though it would cost a bit more you will get a better example). So I called up the sales chap who picks me up from the station in his BMW Z3 and off we go to inspect the M5.
Now this is the hard part, the more you know about the car the better a car you will get. After checking the papers and logbook, I found out the car was due for an extensive service called an Inspection II. There were some other checks I asked to be carried out like a compression test on the engine. After promising to get the workshop people to sort the car out and call me the next day, I left.
Back to the train station for what should have been a one-hour train ride to Bad- Salzuflen. The time was 7.30pm. I got on a train, which should have been going south. This one was going north. Yes, the simple remedy would be, discovering your mistake, get off at the next stop but the point is you first have to discover your mistake. An hour and a few hundred kilometers later, when it seemed I was the last person on the train I found a middle-aged man who I asked in my pigeon german if I was near Bad- Salzuflen!....... He finally composed himself after laughing hysterically for several minutes and informed me I had gone 200 kilometers in the wrong direction and that the next stop was the North Sea!
This M5 will not kill me.
To his credit, he produced out of a large bag, a railway guide and explained how I would get "home". It was 8.45 pm.
Got off the train at the next stop unto a deserted open-air station in a hamlet called Bremen-und-something, where its 17 inhabitants probably had never seen a blackman in the flesh. Half-expecting a group of young neo-nazis to jump out of the bushes and give me a good beating, I made frantic calls to my partner in our hotel and a friend in England "If you guys don't see me again...."
I had to wait about 25 minutes for the next train. It was bitterly cold. After a convoluted journey and a very expensive taxi ride for the last 100 kilometers I arrived at my hotel at about 2 am.
This M5 will not kill me.
The rest of the story is not as dramatic. Got Steven the salesman's call the next day saying they had put the car right and that they had changed a faulty water pump among other things. I zipped over for a final inspection and test drive. It was our last day in Germany and I was pressed for time but as I had arranged with a shipper who was waiting in Hamburg about 130kilometers away I was not worried. I had brought my International Drivers license so I could go on a test drive During my eventful drive we conducted our final negotiations finally agreeing on a price which included transporting the car to my shippers in Hamburg.
There, I saw the car off to the port. My work in Germany done all I had to do was get back to my hotel, pack and get to the airport in time for my flight back home. Anyone thinking that's all it takes to import a car will be looking for trouble. The next thing to do, after getting you bill of lading, which done properly should arrive before the ship does is find out from your clearing agent which gang of workers will handle the ship your car is on. With some coaxing they will ensure your car is handled carefully and once off the ship is parked in a conspicuous and therefore relatively safe place.
I was lucky the car was in my possession two days after it came off the ship. What is like to own, to drive, where will I find replacement parts? These questions do not concern me right now. I am traveling my road.
Postscript: I have had mostly smiles though I am currently saving for EDC dampers for the car. As you would have notice it is written from the perspective of someone from this part of the world. It does not spoil it does it? So what's your story?Everyone's got a story............
enjoymentman
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