Cars In Costa Rica: A Bad Idea Since 1962

As any tourist who�s rented a car in Costa Rica can affirm, driving here can be as much a hair-raising, terrifying adventure as any experience related to zip-lines, bungee jumping, or killer waves. If you live here, though, cars are more of a necessary evil, especially in Berl�n. If you ever feel the need to get out of Berl�n, there is a bus that goes a few times a day between Berl�n and San Ram�n; however, when you arrive, then you�re stuck in San Ram�n, in which case the solution itself presents a whole new problem.

There are also taxis, as well as the option of attempting to constantly bum a ride from someone going down-mountain, but of those two options, the former is very expensive and the latter just plain sucks. Indeed, the only real workable solution to living in Berl�n seems to be to buy a car. In the past, we had a RAV-4, but after seeing how expensive maintenance, gas, annual inspections, registrations, and especially insurance was becoming, we decided to sell it and downgrade to a cheaper sedan or coupe.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Costa Rica seems to be a strange sort of twilight zone for car depreciation values, in that the values of many cars here go up, not down, and the result is a terribly skewed pricing system in which a 1985 jeep-style Land Cruiser sells for $11,000, and in general the prices of most cars are about twice what they would be in the U.S. For a nominally poor, third-world country, I�m not sure how they can maintain this system wherein many families� cars cost more than their houses.

The upside of this strange arrangement, though, is that I was able to sell the RAV-4 for quite a bit of money, even while offering it a bit below market price. I also barely lost any money by reselling it two years and thousands of kilometers after I bought it. (In fact, here I sold my 2001 RAV-4 with around 110,000 miles for about the same price I sold my 2005 Subaru with only about 10,000 miles in the U.S.�like I said, it�s weird.)

Once I sold the RAV-4, though, I didn�t have a car. My father-in-law Honorio graciously let us use his Land Cruiser for a while, but we didn�t want to take advantage of his generosity. We began looking for cars, but found a market inundated with expensive crap. Around the same time, I found some statistics in the paper regarding car sales in Costa Rica. Here is a breakdown of the most commonly-sold cars in the country, according to their percentage share of the market:

Hyundai�30%
Toyota�25%
Nissan�20%
Geo�10%
Kia�10%
Suzuki�5%

For me, this is very interesting. I�d like to see a breakdown of how these figures look in the U.S., just to compare, but I�m sure it�d be quite different. In any case, you�ll notice that with the exception of Geo, there�s virtually NO presence of American cars here, and a glance around on the street confirms this. On a recent trip to my old job, I made it my task to count all the American cars I saw. An hour later, after I�d counted about 5 Geo Trackers and one Ford Ranger truck, I finally saw two Ford Fiestas as I was pulling into the commercial park where I worked. I know I�ve already mentioned this, but to me it�s incredible that Costa Rica, with its close relations and dependence on many American things, can have virtually no American cars. Especially considering that it�s got to be much easier logistically to import a car from the U.S. than from Japan or Korea, this whole idea doesn�t really speak to well to the image or quality of American cars here.

But I digress. After searching for a few weeks, my goofy friend Luis called randomly to say that he�d found a Nissan Sentra that we ended up liking. We bought it a few days later, while our friend Annie was visiting. The car was unfortunately named �Campanita�� or �Tinkerbell� --and it had a totally lame sticker on the back window to confirm its handle. I scraped it off with a razor blade one evening while Angela was at work, much to her dismay. Hey, I know that Tinkerbell was kinda hot, and that guys often name their cars after girls, but I don�t think this is what they had in mind when they started this custom.

In any case, our car now has no name, but it�s been serving us relatively well, especially considering the sort of inclines it has to go up in order to get from Palmares to Berl�n. And the best thing of all: It�s not a Hyundai.

Now all that�s missing is a Sad Jesus Head sticker.