The car I've sold is the Nissan Terrano/Pathfinder 4WD for reasons of economy. The people who dream up new ways of frustrating the population in New Zealand (I think they're called policy analysts) have come up with a scheme to make driving a diesel car uneconomic in the extreme. What they have done is taxed diesel cars the same as diesel trucks because in their minds all diesel cars (like perhaps a Peugeot 106 diesel) cause the same amount of wear and tear on the roads as 20-30 tonne trucks do. So that made it unattractive to own a diesel car any longer and this really solidified our resolve to try and sell the car and buy a pick-up truck (called a 'ute' in NZ and Aus.) instead.
I put
a "for sale" sign in the window of the car and Mal, who also comes to the Sunday market we go to, saw it and told me he was interested. I told him that we were only selling because we wanted to buy a ute and he told me he had a ute he wanted to sell. The result was that we put our heads together over a period of two weeks and hammered out a deal we were both happy with. In the end we swapped cars with me giving Mal a couple of old cellphones and car kits as well as a couple of old fax machines.
Now we are the proud owners of our own "beaut ute" and, more importantly, we are out of the diesel trap. The beaut ute is a Ford Courier, 2.2 litre, XL single cab, 2WD (we would have preferred 4WD). The good things about it are that it is 5 years newer than the Nissan and will cost a lot less to run while giving us all the space we need to carry our wares.
And Mal? Well, he really is Mal Gibson but his speech is rather more refined that the Mal you're thinking of. And this Mal lives just a few kilometres down the road from me.
