Another Activity To Waste Your Precious Sunday Away

It has been a while since my last article but I have got valid reasons for not posting anything.

1. Watching the complete Second Season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD. (all 20+ episodes in a week);

2. Watching Casino Royale. Pretty good I must say. However, not like what you’d expect but close to the Bond that Mr. Fleming pictured him to behave and act;

3. Preparing stuff for my company’s display at a certain Defence Exhibition in Indonesia as any merchant of these kind of stuff would do;

4. Discussed World politics and also the current Administration of Pak Lah with a Dutchman friend of mine; and

5. Went to a car auction.

This of course brings me to the topic of the APAC Sunday Auction for Automobiles which I attended last Sunday. Big business this auctions. You get individual sellers, companies, government bodies and banks auctioning off vehicles and you get individual buyers and also used car salesmen buying up cars for their own use or for resale. What impressed me the most is that here, you can have RM2,500.00 and be lucky to drive off in a 1988 Proton Saga (but sometimes you need a battery to get the car started or worse). How about a 1993 Isuzu Trooper 4 door (ex-Telekom Malaysia)? RM6,500.00. You get all the cred of a farmer or a contractor instead of an el-cheapo Proton Saga owner who collects scrap metal for a living cum small time crook. The engine of the trooper sounded pretty smooth as it drove by.

How about a 1996 Alfa Romeo 155 1.8 for RM18,000.00? I suppose you wouldn’t want Alfa related headaches but for RM18,000, why not? A Proton Gen2 1.6 registered in 2005 for RM33,000 would also be good. It costs RM50,000.00+ when new. A friend of mine said that he’d go to the auction and buy one when it drops to RM10,000.00 as it’s a fun car to drive and he’d love a fun car to drive it to the market and back.

If you want to start carting large stuff around or start your own pasar malam business, you have ex-Telekom Toyota Liteaces, Perodua Rusas and also the odd Proton Juara. RM6,500.00 gets you a nicely worn but mechanically sound Toyota Liteace and if you want a post 2000 van, the Juara is there although when it first came out and cost RM40K+, no one in his or her right mind would buy one because it looked downright silly and ugly. Didn’t stop my friend’s dad from buying one as it could be bought for a measly RM16,000.00 to be used as a carrier for their foodcourt stall business. Pretty good when something has a purpose instead of lugging around only people which some MPV owners fail to do.

There are cars that don’t get buyers. One such example is a Citroen C5. The reserve was set at RM40,000.00. But who would want to own pain and suffering? It’ll be like owning the Titanic knowing that it cost you a bomb and then 5 minutes later sinks in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Another example, not surprisingly are 3 units of Government utilised Proton Perdana from 1999. The opening price was RM30,000.00. No one wanted one. Not even the second hand dealers. I suppose the dreaded gearbox problems kept buyers away.

I was there at 10.50am on Sunday and stayed on till 1pm. The auction still had about 40 more cars to go and there was a nice Fiat Coupe waiting somewhere. But I don’t think it got a buyer. A nice place to waste your Sunday away unless you work somewhere around here that is.