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If you come from the USA, Canada, UK or much of western Europe you may find the experience of buying a used car to be very different from home for many reasons.

The most obvious difference is that used cars in Thailand would seem very expensive compared to a similar age used car in many western countries, that’s because cars depreciate much slower in Thailand and that can work very much to your advantage when calculating the cost of ownership over say 2-3 years as opposed to simply looking at the purchase price.

Example A:  I buy a 3 year old Toyota in the UK for 3000 pounds (150,000) baht, it needs a couple of things fixing (as virtually ALL used cars do) and these repairs are expensive in the UK because labour costs are expensive.  The warranty has finished so to save money I use non-franchised repair shops, over the next 3 years for regular maintenance and for the annual MOT tests I spend another 3000 pounds and when I come to sell the car I discover that it’s worth 1000 pounds.  My cost of ownership has been 5000 pounds (250,000 baht) for 3 years of motoring.

Example B: I buy a 3 year old Toyota in Thailand for 350,000 baht, parts and labor is cheap in Thailand so I can have it properly maintained by Toyota franchised dealers and over the next 3 years I spend a total of 50,000 baht on maintenance, I sell the car for 290,000 baht and my total cost of ownership has been 110,000, that’s less than half the cost of ownership in example A

In Example A a 3 year old car is the UK costs less than half the price that I’d pay in Thailand, however the cost of ownership over a 3 year period in the UK is more then double what I’d expect in Thailand and that doesn’t even take into account tax and insurance that are cheaper in Thailand.

Conclusion:  Whilst the price of a used car is greater in Thailand, the cost of ownership is lower in nearly all cases when compared to countries such as the UK, USA or Western Europe.

This website is all about cars in Thailand, choosing them, buying them and even selling them.

As this website is in English and written by a expat, it’s expected that the readers will probably be expats or visitors to Thailand, however we do hope that it will be a useful resource for our Thai friends also and anyone else around the world with an interest in Thailand motoring.

Many visitors to Thailand choose to stay, or at least to spend a considerable amount of time living here, one of the necessities of modern life for many of us is a car.  There are many cars for sale in Thailand, but it can be bit of a minefield for the inexperienced.  Many expats choose to buy new cars simply because it’s so much easier than buying a used car, and less risk is involved.

We feel that with a little homework the risks of buying a used car can be kept to a minimum and that the benefits of buying a good used car can weigh heavily in the decision to buy new or used.