Jussi's 10Centuries Playground

@matigo @sumudu The make and color of the car do not matter to me. But most likely the ”new” one will be either white or dark gray (or black) as those tend to be the default colors in this part of the world and people are unwilling to pay a few hundred Euro more for a more vibrant color. 😆

For the make, it will be one of the usual suspects: Renault, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel, Volkswagen¹, Mitsubishi, or Toyota. Occasionally I see a BMW listed, but those are fairly rare for 7-seaters.

Or Klonkswagen, as one of my colleagues call them due to the sound their older car tends to make…

matigo.ca.

2021-07-06T14:58:34Z

Once again I have been looking at cars while I am on vacation. The one we currently have is now 10 years old, which means that it has started to have more and more issues. That has triggered me to look for a newer (used) car that would have less issues to sort out. While there are numerous cars available in the ”market” at the moment, our list of ”requirements” limit the selection a lot. And I mean a lot.

The biggest issue is that we need at least 6 seats for at least 5 more years. After that both of our daughters have, hopefully, moved out¹. Until then we need, in practice, a 7-seater.

The second factor is the price. There are, in general, plenty of 7-seater options available, but the majority of them are brand new or almost new and thus well out of our budget². That limits the available options to used cars that are 3–6 years old.

Then there is the issue with the location of the seller. I would prefer to test drive a car before making the decision to ”buy” it, so driving 500+ km for a bad experience is something I am not willing to do. Luckily, as we live in the area where a huge portion of Finns live³, the majority of options are located fairly close to us.

However, our options are not limited by the feature requests we have for a car. Of course, we would like to get low fuel consumption and as many safety features as possible, but other things like automatic transmission⁴ or special audio setup are not critical. Of course, we have a list of nice-to-have features, but we can live without them. Then again, those are pretty often built-in with relatively new cars.

To us (and especially to me), a car is a tool to get from point A to point B. I don’t enjoy driving, but depending on the road and traffic (or more specifically, the other drivers) I might like it a bit. Also, I hate the fact that they can have issues that are no longer easy to fix yourself. But due to the circumstances of needing a transportation tool for the whole family (or the groceries) and Finland not having great public transportation in all the places we would need to go, owning and driving a car is something I just need to tolerate.

Here the kids usually move out when they are 19–20 years old and they start their university (college) studies.
Even when paid in monthly installments.
In the capital region, there are ~1M inhabitants, while in the Uusimaa region there are ~2M inhabitants. Finland as a whole has ~5.6M inhabitants.
In Finland people tend to get their driver’s license education with cars that have a manual gearbox. Cars with automatic transmission were relatively uncommon until 2000s.

2021-07-06T11:16:09Z

Strawberry, yum!