A Car

Sitting on the right, driving on the left, shifting with your left hand!

Last week I bought a car. It's four years old and because it just had its birthday, it was time for the NCT: The National Car Test. Cars must pass it when they have been registered for the first four years and every two years after that. They check emission but also tires, breaks, glass, lights (including aim), mirrors, instruments, alignment, suspension, rust on structural elements, and other safety related things. You can see the 92-page manual here.
I bought my car from a dealer so they did a service on it and made sure it passes the NCT. One reason I chose a dealer is that it is hard to buy a car, when you don't have a car. I found this car on the web and then rode my bike to the dealer to go look at it and test drive it through Phoenix park. The whole time we talked about triathlons because the dealer did the Dublin City Triathlon just like I did last August and then got sick, just like I did.
Cars are expensive in Ireland. One reason is that they get taxed quite a bit when they are first registered here. Then you also have to pay a tax to drive it every year. Until 2008, the tax used to be based on the size of the car's engine. Since then, the tax is based on the CO2 emission. My car is in the lowest class and gets 50 miles to the gallon. Petrol too, is expensive here.
In my search I did see a couple of sporty cars that were relatively inexpensive. Insurance, gas, and road tax are high for those, because most of them have big engines. Even if they don't emit a lot of CO2, the 2008's and older are now very expensive to drive around, hence the good deals available. I was tempted to have a midlife crisis, but my budget calculations sobered me up again.

My calculator from 8th grade.

There is no publicly available Kelley's Blue Book or an edmunds.com to look up how much a car should cost. But there is a way to cheat. In order to calculate the vehicle tax when a car is first registered here, its value is taken into consideration. The revenue service offers an online tool to perform this calculation. You enter the car make, model, mileage, age, etc. and get back how much it is worth and how much the tax is. You can try it out yourself here.
I paid a little bit more than that at the dealer, but get a year's worth of warranty, road side assistance, a full service, and the NCT. Insurance is another matter. It's pricey as well, but goes down with each no-claim year and as long as you don't have any traffic violations. I qualify for all that, except, of course, I'm in none of their data bases. I have no driving history here. I'm trying to get some kind of statement from my US car insurance and hope an insurance company here will accept it.

The first insurance company I called would not even insure me until I have been here for at least two of the last three years. The next one wanted 1,700 Euros. I'm glad I didn't go for that sports car!
I have gotten some more reasonable offers by now, but it still seems like a lot of money. It reminds me when I first arrived in the USA. Same thing: no credit history and no driving history; premiums were sky high. I remember walking into a Sears and Discover had a stand setup there. They told me I should get one of their credit cards and it would help me build a credit history. I didn't really want one, but after a while let her convince me to fill out an application.
A few weeks later I received by mail (that's how things worked back then) a notification that they would not issue me a credit card because of my missing credit history. Ever since then I gleefully tear up offers from Discover. Now they would love to have me as a customer. Sorry guys ;-)

License plates in Ireland encode the year when the car was first registered, in the first two digits. That is usually followed by one or two letters that indicate the county where the car is registered: D for Dublin, KE forKildare, etc.
So, by looking at the license plates you can see how old the cars are. At work, it seems, many are between three to five year old on average. Where I live, most of them are around ten years old or older. Ever since I learned about this, I had this urge to drive around various company parking lots and see which ones pay their employees the most.
The other neat thing you can do is to take the license plate info and enter it here or here. You'll get back some basic info about the car (brand, model, color, diesel or petrol, etc.) If you pay them, you can get more information: whether it has been in an accident, whether there is a loan and a lien against it, how many owners it had, and other useful information about a car before you buy it. Like car fax in the States.