So when we came to Israel, one of the things that I was so excited about was the savings involved in not having to own a vehicle. We would take advantage of the great mass transit in the country and would save money and have tremendous flexibility in traveling.
After 4 months in the country, I can state pretty conclusively that this is partially true, and that is the reason that we are purchasing a car. Let’s get into some detail.
First of all, we have used the mass transit in the country and it is really good. During regular hours, we can go almost anywhere is the town (for that matter, the country) via a pretty seamless process which uses either a credit card (rav kav) or a qr code. Really no complaints about mass transit.
However, there are two major scenario's where mass transit fails and that's what gets to the crux to the decision.
1. Doing any weekend travelling. Israel is a small country. Except for the extreme south, the vast majority of the country is easily reachable withing 2-3 hours. And if you travelled during the week, public transportation would notn be an issue to get there.
However, the due to my daughters school and my work, the only days we can really travel are Friday and Saturday and public transportation shuts down in the Country on those days….from 3 PM or so on Friday to sundown Saturday, there is simply to easily accessable public transportation.
Last month, we rented a car and went to Ikea on Friday morning and Masada, Ein Gedi, and the Dead Sea on Saturday. It was wonderful and started the discussion on the need for a car.
A 3 day car rental was around 1000 NIS, which means that if we were able to find a car in the 20K NIS range it would be around 20 trips. If the car would last 3 years, that would be easily acheived.
2. Food shopping. For the last three months we have been shopping using public transportation. I cannot tell you what a pain it has been. It requires us to shop 3 to 4 times as much as necessary to ensure we have the necessary supplies. It makes it impossible to take advantage of deals as well as get frozen foods very easily.
Is there on line shopping? Yes, plenty. The problem is then you have to commit to when they can deliver, we still did not get good frozen foods because of the time it took to get to the house, and they always forgot something which would either come in the evening or the next day.
So we started looking for cars. New cars are very expensive and leasing is not a workable option as many companies wanted open end leases, which means you might owe a balloon payment in the end. I did not want to spend much money, but I wanted something that was mechanically sound and could trust.
After putting messages on Facebook, I was given the number of a used car specialist who helps find cars. He led us to a 2010 Mazda 2 that appears to meet the requirements of what we wanted as a weekend car. It appeared to be mecahnically sould and had 170K KM, which is around 90K miles.
The specialist has a mechanic, who did recommend several thousand NIS of repairs, which was negotiated in the cost. So how much did we pay?
Car (including registration, repairs and payment to the specialist). 23,000 NIS
Insurance- 2,500 NIS
Annual testing- 500 NIS
We have taken the car grocery shopping as well as on some short trips and it seems to be perfect for us.
My recommendation? Well, talk to me in a year, but if you can afford it, you have to consider the possibility of such a purchase even if you are in an area that have good public transportation.