Car Shopping

We finally have our own car. After four weeks with the rental Camry, it was time. As the family researcher, I am tasked with major purchase decisions so I had been busy learning what I could about the Oman car market. It's a good bit more difficult to buy a car in a foreign country, especially one where the vehicles tend to be either European or Asian brands unfamiliar to the US Market. Among these brands are Great Wall (Chinese), Fiat (Italy), Peugeot (France), Skoda (Czech), and Tata (India). Luckily, you can still buy well known brands like GMC, Ford, Chevy, Toyota, and Nissan as well.

We pared our choices down pretty quickly by throwing out the unfamiliar brands. Also, unfortunately the reviews on US brands reliability are still not good - I was open to including US vehicles in our search but I just couldn't find one that measured up well.

Beyond reliability, we needed 4-wheel drive, storage space, the latch system for car seats and extra seating. Pointed firmly towards medium to large SUV's, I looked into Volvo and Land Rover first since their showrooms were right by the house (Lazy, right?). Volvo doesn't offer third row seats and their nearest model, the XC60, went for $50K so, um no thank you.  The Land Rover LR2 met our needs but this British made vehicle didn't score well in online research. We'd owned a Nissan Pathfinder in Doha so Nissan was next on the list. I test drove the Nissan Armada and the new Pathfinder. The Armada is a large SUV with seating for up to 8 and it drove like one. I could hardly make a turn in it and forget about maneuvering into small parking spaces.

Also, there were no latch anchors for child car seats. Many of the models I looked at lacked latch anchors. This is standard on every vehicle sold in the US, but not here. Many Arabs don't use car seats for their children (or wear seat belts themselves), and you can see kids standing on the seats, etc. on the freeway. Culturally, they believe that if it's your time to go it's your time, and a car seat or seat belt won't help one way or the other. Obviously, we take a different view.

Back to my reviews. The Pathfinder did better in the test drive, with enough room and good acceleration. It maneuvered well in roundabouts as well. My main issues were the ugly, boxy design and the air conditioning. The A/C was quite cold in the front seats, but the rear vents didn't get cold even on the coldest setting. That's a deal breaker in a country where it reaches 45c/105f in the summer; especially with kids in car seats sitting back there.  Still, I'd hoped I made a mistake and just failed to hit a button or something.

That left Toyota.  Toyota is the unquestioned king of the Middle East market.  Toyota has been here over 30 years and makes usually reliable vehicles with cold A/C.  A winning combination in Oman...  My focus was on the Toyota Fortuner and the Land Cruiser Prado.  The Fortuner didn't have child latch anchors so that one got thrown out early.  Then I had a great test drive with the Prado, which did everything the Pathfinder does but with cold air and a better design.  The only put off was that the only color available was white, and of a white Land Cruiser is like the national car of Qatar.  So it was cliche but we couldn't resist.  Meet our new car!