Bear Trakker: The Vehicle

Oh what a feeling... Toyota!!

When I first was able to buy a car I was interested in powerful, fast, four door saloons common to Australia. I learned my lesson about the pitfalls of these cars, some of you reading would know about what I'm talking about, many would not.

Once entitled to a company car working in the mining industry in Australia, this put me in the position of having a choice of 'Toyota' or 'Toyota'... the workhorse light vehicle. Though I was not overly interested in 4WD vehicles for personal use at this time, five years of continual use showed me that Toyota Landcruisers are comfortable, pleasant to drive, have adequate power and speed, but above all are highly dependable.

In researching vehicles for the trip, I was really only looking at a couple of options; Toyota Landcruiser 120 / 150 series, Toyota Landcruiser 80 / 100 series and Nissan Patrols. At the end of the day, in Europe, there are not a lot of 80 / 100 series and the 120 / 150 series seemed better value for money than the Patrols, of which I am not so familiar with.

New or old, what mods?

The decision around whether to buy a newer or older model vehicle revolved around a few key criteria. Within a fixed budget, purchasing a newer vehicle would mean less change to spend on accessorising, but would save on import duties into Mongolia.

I figured that a newer model was also likely to have fewer maintenance issues (touch wood), and as someone more akin to working with a keyboard than a socket set this was important. Mind you, whether the car was a 120 or 150 series, I figured that anything wrong aside from the basics of fluids and tyres as going to require some special help given the modern electronics.

Based upon the import duties, I settled on trying to find something of a build date later than September 2007, with low kilometres and some 'necessary' comforts in Mongolia such as heated seats. The other options that I was narrowing the search down with included that:

It must be a diesel engine (only low octane unleaded petrol or leaded petrol is available widely in rural Mongolia)
It should only be the 4 cylinder diesel (the V8 diesel was too expensive to buy, import and run)
Only one owner, with proven service history (including accident free) was required
Manual transmission only, for pleasure and purpose. Automatic 4WDs are town cars.
Other items of interest but not deal breakers were tinted windows, leather seats, sunroof, tow ball, snorkel and sub fuel tank (of which I could not find a single unit for sale in Europe!).

Having now decided on a later model vehicle, the budget for modification in preparation for over landing needed some scrutiny. In the initial stages I think I might have had some wild ideas about the preparations, which needed to be wound back a touch.

Having driven unmodified 120 series Landcruisers in coal mines in Australia for several years, I think that excessive vehicle modifications are for those wanting to test their skills and car capability in some hugely unforgiving terrain. Our journey is planned on roads, and although the roads in some countries may be akin to off roading, they are still roads.

Hence, my thoughts for vehicle preparation turned to dealing with the extreme climate in Mongolia and the basics coupled with a dose of common sense that should hopefully see us not become stranded somewhere desolate like the Murghab plateau in Tajikistan.

The basics in my mind regarding not becoming stranded involved good tyres, good batteries and good quality roof bars to support the load of the tent. In this regard the plan was to install a secondary battery, a dual battery control system, all terrain tyres and roof bars. Nothing fancy like suspension upgrades, bull bar, winch, rear bar, hi-lift jacks, air lockers, air compressors etc was required.

I just needed to find someone whom I could have organise and complete this work either prior to collection or shortly thereafter.

I'm an Australian, living in Mongolia: I want to buy a car from you in...

Right.... I figured this wasn't going to be all that easy, but I did think it was going to be so hard. I mean, the European economies haven't exactly been kicking goals in 2012, and I figured that anyone in business would be ready to sell anything sight unseen to a foreigner willing to lay down a deposit. There are obviously more shrewd people in business than I.

I contacted several car owners and dealerships via postings at www.autoscout24.eu, taking the time to write English and German / Spanish / Italian / Dutch versions using Google Translate. For the most part, I think everyone thought that my proposal was too weird or too difficult to cater to.

For some reason, no one seemed to care that as a non-EU resident I did not have to pay the VAT if I was exporting the car (which obviously I am). I'm not quite sure how someone can dismiss this (i.e. ~$10,000 value), but it wasn't until I came into contact with Eric Raschpichler at AMZ Gruppe in Stollberg, Germany that I felt that anyone had any appreciation of this.

Anyway, the good news was the Eric was on my wavelength and keen to help out. After some checking on his behalf internally within his company, he got the green light to go ahead with the sale conditional to a holding deposit being placed. Too easy.

After this things just got better, with Eric being extremely helpful with additional services performed by the dealership he works at. All car modifications complete were done by AMZ Gruppe, including some unusual items such as installing the roof top tent, dual battery system and helpfully acting as a postage destination for some of our camping equipment which we purchased online.

So... what car did we end up with? It is a 2011 model 60th Anniversary edition of the Toyota Landcruiser 150, with the 140 kW D-4D diesel engine. For those in a Australia, I think this is 2011 Prado, somewhere between the VX and Kakadu models.

It is an ex-demo model, with only 3,500 km on the odometer (and for those in Mongolia, odometers are not wound back before sale in Europe!). It has all the aforementioned optional extras of interest, except that it currently does not have tinted windows.