June 26, 2010

by Stephen Jan in New York

Last month, I returned to New York with high hopes that our newly selected ambulance, fondly dubbed Penny Lane, would be taking us to Mongolia in German VW style. After my “expert” 20 minute visual inspection, my heart was set on Penny and I returned to home, declaring to the Mongol Rally community that we would be driving a 1992 VW through the siberian tundra into Mongolia.

We discovered in the following weeks that we stumbled into a treasure trove of problems and trouble. It turned out that the Penny’s inspection sticker expired long ago. We didn’t think that that would be a problem. We anticipated that we would need a budget to repair the car, and figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. Boy were we wrong. Let’s go in order here…. In order for us to get plates for the car, we need to register the car. You can’t register the car unless you get an inspection sticker. You can’t get an inspection sticker unless the car is proven to be “ road worthy”. A car is “road worthy” only if the inspector decrees that all items on the car are in working order. To identify all the items that are not in working order, a mechanic needs to do a through inspection. Now here’s where it all breaks down: the car dealer will not allow our mechanic to thoroughly check the car to get an estimate on the repair cost unless we buy the car. Bull. This essentially meant we could get stuck with a repair bill that ran into the thousands and not fixing it meant we couldn’t even get plates, let alone out of the city.

We decided last week that the risk was way too high and pulled out of the deal, and immediately started scrambling to find an ambulance this week that already had inspection sticker. We found one, but it was 5000 euros - double that of the previous car, which drove me into hyper fund raising mode.

I’ve lost count as to how many unveiling i’ve done. But here it is, the final (hopefully) unveiling of the Magical Mongolian Mystery Mobile: