AQUISITION of SB05KPE
Suddenly, we became acutely aware that time was slipping away at a rate of knots – whereas the countdown clock had started in excess of three hundred days, it had now surreptitiously sipped to around two hundred and fifty. Fifty days gone already – or, put another way, seven weeks – and we were still no nearer to acquiring a suitable set of wheels. The decision had been made to use a Hyundai, to bite the bullet and pay the Organisers an additional £141 Wimp-Tax to be donated to a charity of our choice. This meant we could look for a car with a heady 1341cc, and a three-door Accent fitted the bill perfectly, endorsed by the fact that PK Motors, the Main Hyundai Agents in Tunbridge Wells, had agreed to part-purchase the car once found.
That’s the question ‘Why on earth a Hyundai?’ answered. Now for the question ‘Why a three-door?’ More difficult to answer without the heart ruling the head – it boiled down to a compromise of vanity [the three-door version looks a little more like an Audi Quattro than the four-door version if you squint a bit] and practicality. In general, two-door cars usually have larger doors than their four-door siblings, and there are two less to rattle around or even fly open as we take to the air from an ill-timed yump…. There are also two less to inadvertently leave unlocked when you can’t really rely on the central locking being up to scratch.
Both Autotrader – and our favourite on-line auction site, eBay – threw up very similar results. There seemed to be a nationwide proliferation of pre-1999 registered cars, and a plethora of others up to – and including – the model-year 2002, but a dearth of anything registered after January 2003 unless one happened to be looking for a five-door mini-cab. Essentially, there were only seven contenders that were quickly whittled down to just four. Of the four, a telephone call was placed to an independent garage near Doncaster and, after the price tag had been negotiated down by £250:00 deposit was put down on the one-owner 45K-mile car, subject to a satisfactory inspection and test drive.
We couldn’t have picked a worse day to travel the two hundred and twenty or so miles north: notwithstanding that accidents and road works dogged our journey we still made good time, arriving four and a half hours – and a couple of stops – later. The silver car stood on the narrow concrete road leading to the somewhat uninspiring forecourt; a large red sticker slapped across the middle of the windscreen proclaimed that it was ‘Sold’. Was it really sold? With the sight of a rippled near side door put firmly to the back of our minds the vehicle was taken on a test drive and to be fair, it drove exactly as it should. It started, stopped, and the indicators and lights all worked. However, a more detailed inspection of the bodywork soon revealed the car had at some time been involved in a rear-end shunt: in itself this wasn’t a serious problem but the ‘new’ paint had been badly matched to the original and the filler looked as if it had been applied with the handle of a trowel. Thank you, but no thank you. We arranged for our deposit to be returned whilst we reprogrammed the sat-nav to find Oldham, a city in which another second hand example of one of Korea’s finest exports lurked….
As we made the final right hand turn in accordance with the robotic instructions being issued from the technological marvel stuck to the windscreen we were faced with the remains of a part-demolished building. Sixty years ago the words Bomb-site Car Lot would have sprung to mind but there was no sight of the large array of multi-coloured vehicles that the slick, professional-looking web site had promised. We were about three hundred yards away when we first spotted the lines of used cars imprisoned behind black-painted Victorian railings about six foot high. There, sporting a flat rear tyre and a number of cobwebs stood SB05KPE. The flat tyre proved to be a valuable asset that we seized with both hands, and our opening gambit was ‘That Accent. It’s obviously been hanging around for some – perhaps we could help to move it on for you.’ Before we bothered to get the tyre pumped up we flipped the bonnet open - to reveal another, bog-standard engine that hadn’t seen a steam-cleaner for a number of years. On the other hand, the battery terminals were freshly greased and the engine oil clean with no signs of emulsification on the underside of the filler cap. Another bonus: it started on the turn of the key, and the subsequent test-drive convinced us that, subject to price, we’d found a sound vehicle suitable for tackling all the Gobi desert could throw at us. All that remained was to check the vehicles credentials, to cross-reference the mileage on the stack of old MOTs with the fully-stamped Service Book and to note that it was, indeed, a genuine 70K one-owner car that had lived most of it’s life near Glasgow. Glasgow \ Kent \ Ulaanbaatar. This was one Accent that had been built to travel!