Ok, Mustachians... please help me approach this ongoing life-style dilemma regarding our cars and our overseas assignments.
I work for the U.S. Government, and will spend most of my career abroad. We move to a new country about every 2-4 years. Each one of these countries has their own idiosyncratic rules and regulations about what cars can and can't be imported into their country. Often they have an age limit -- can't be older than 3 years, or 5 years or 8 years, or whatever. Sometimes there's a limitation on left v. right hand drive. Sometimes there are color limitations (India, for instance, doesn't allow red cars to be imported, although they can be sold in India from Indian dealers. Why? Who knows!) Sometimes they can only be brought in if you pay to have certain equipment removed, which is almost always standard on US cars -- things like catalytic converters or tinted windows.
This is an enormous pain in my fundament, and causes me to take on a side-gig as a particularly lousy used car salesperson on a semi-regular basis and I hate it. I can usually chose between importing a car we own, trading the car we own for something that is import-eligible (if what we have isn't already), trying to sell the car before we leave the country to another incoming staff member (this is so stressful it made my hair fall out the last time we tried) or storing the car we own in Government Storage and buying something when we get there -- presuming there's a something available, and we can pay cash for it. (We CAN finance, but that involves working with my Agency's Federal Credit Union, who I swear are the stupidest humans alive. It's got to be in their recruiting materials -- "Have an I.Q. under 80, and lack feelings of empathy or any customer service skills? Have we go the job for you!")
It's extra-complicated by the fact that we are also a family of five, and my husband (and probably one day my three boys) are freakishly tall, so it's very hard to find a car that fits all of us on the local market... especially when the host country norm is for the kids to pile in with the parents without car seats. So there's a non-zero chance that if we put all our eggs in the "buy something when you get there" basket, we'd end up failing to find anything that worked available within the community. Sometimes we're allowed to buy from private sellers, and sometimes we're not... but figuring out how to buy a used car in language I don't know in a country I've just arrived in is a non-trivial problem. Possible, but hard!
Biking, car pooling, walking to work, etc. are options we use when weather and security situation permits it, and we have mostly managed to live with one car for the family... but we still do seem to need at least one vehicle that can fit all of us in it.
I am inherently a "drive it until it dies" kind of gal (and have enjoyed seeing the 300,000 mile mark roll on two Hondas in my lifetime), and so this whole thing makes me irrationally stressed out and angry and gives me hives. I'd love any suggestions and insight on how someone with more distance and mustachian kung-fu would approach this gordian knot.
