Bye Blackie

Outdated post:

We traded in our reliable Blackie.

Due to the insane COE prices, buying a new car never crossed our minds until Feb this year. We learnt that my father-in-law traded in his 8 yr old Toyota Vanguard for a very good price. Just for fun, I sought a quotation from the same dealer for our 6 yr old Honda Fit. We were pleasantly surprised – for a car with less than half its COE lifespan, it could fetch us more than half of what wifey paid for it.

Now, I have been eyeing Honda Vezel for a long time now. It looks sturdy, has a good height, comes in a few colour choices, is of a reliable Japanese brand and is also very fuel efficient! We worked out the sums and discovered that a brand new Vezel costs the same in annual depreciation, as compared to fully depreciating Blackie's COE. This, plus a brand new car (COE reset to 10 years) and a bigger and more spacious one at that, it’s a straight forward decision to make.

On 12 July 2016, the deal was complete. We bade farewell to blackie (who saw us through friendship, dating, marriage and birth of our baby!) and welcomed our new servant –

Loving it.

As a typical Singaporean would, I went to buy 4d of my vehicle registration number. After 3 draws, the number came nowhere close. Curiously I searched on the history and was shocked to learn that in the history of Singapore Pools (since May 1986), the number had only opened 4 times! And the most recent was in 2005!