End of the Car Adventure

So, my “glorious” car adventure has come to an inglorious end. I sold my car two weeks ago after being a car owner for two years and nine months.

Since last November, I rode the car for three times, all of those three times were in April (twice with my driving teacher, once alone) and that was it. Under such circumstances it has no meaning to own a car.

The being-scared-shitless before driving never eased and I saw no sign that it would get any better in the near future, at least not as long as I am living in the greater Kanto area. There are too many cars here, too many people, bicycles, scooters, too many narrow streets and it just freaks me out. On a small island with less traffic and a speed limit of fifty kilometers per hour I think I could get used to it despite narrow roads but in the greater Tokyo area I don’t see a chance to get less afraid of driving.

Now how do you sell a car in the greater Tokyo area? Especially when you don’t want to drive it anymore anywhere?

At first I phoned the used car dealer where I bought the beast but he said, they don’t come to pick it up, I have to drive it there twice, first for assessment and then for handing it over. No thank you.

So next I looked in the Internet and found a site where you can put in some basic data for your car and then they promise to call you within 24 hours. They called me after, I’m not kidding, five minutes. Wow. They asked me their standard questions and when I’d be willing to sell the thing. I said: today if you want. Okay! Someone will come to your place to assess the car in 90 minutes! Uoooooo. Lol. Okay, fine by me.

So I went down into the garage and quickly relieved the car of my personal items. As promised, 90 minutes later, a dude arrived from the dealer thing and checked the car. The last time I rode it was in April and ahem…. The battery was dead. The sales guy had to drive his car half into my garage and connected his battery to mine and thank goodness it started up. So he checked the rest of while letting the engine run, charging my battery. Of course he had not a good impression then of my car and the price he offered was in the lower range, but considering that I would have to have called the Japan auto whatever federation for battery help etcetera, I nodded off the price but asked for some thinking time to call a Japanese friend of mine who knows a bit about cars to check what he thinks of the situation and the price offered. All this happened on a Saturday afternoon by the way.

I reached my friend in the evening and he assured me that the deal wasn’t too bad considering the dead battery and the bad impression. If I were to clean up the car, keep on looking and negotiating I might get some more money from another dealer but time is money too. I was under pressure to sell the car, because I’ll be moving to a new place end of October and there I wouldn’t have a free parking slot, so that was another motivation to get rid of the car or commit to driving it, which I couldn’t see myself doing.

Thus I called the sales guy at around 21:00 in the evening (which he assured me was okay to do) and told him I’d sell it. He gave me a bunch of papers necessary for the sale before he left at maybe 19:00 and I was supposed to fill them out and send them to him later. On Sunday then someone came with public transport and on foot to my place and picked up my car and drove away with it! Bye bye car!!!!! Hyaaaaaa….

The car was sold and gone in less than 24 hours. I filled out all the papers and sent them and the second key, and got money transferred within the week after the sale and thus I am not a car owner anymore. The speed of the transaction was marvelous, the service staggering, since I didn’t have to drive the car anymore and apart from filling out papers had no work with it. It is the first car I ever owned and I don’t know how easy or hard it is to sell your car in Germany or elsewhere, but in Japan it was surely a piece of cake.

Even if there was a tiny pinch as I saw the driver guy driving away with my little red devil, I am 95% relieved it is gone and that this form of stress is taken from me. I love my bicycle, I do! It is and remains my favorit form of transportation