Vego and I picked up an exciting little Daihatsu YRV 2001 TURBO the other day. Upon some reflection, I decided to christened the car The Little Red Pickle (TLRP) because I didn't know if it was going to turn out to be a lemon or a plum. After all, we met it, inspected it and decided to purchase it within just a few hours on the same day. The car will be 15 years old soon.
When we first encountered the LRP, the car had quite a few problems (goodie!). This gave us the negotiating power to buy the car for a very reasonable sum from a very reasonable man, a fellow University professor here in Hong Kong.
I was then tasked by Vego (who will the be primary driver of this vehicle once I have made it 100%) to undertake the (fun for me) challenge of researching, co-ordinating the fixing of and final certification of this vehicle as safe and in tip-top shape for her, the most important thing in my life.
Researching a 15 year old car that is no longer in production is a challenge in an of itself. There are almost NO 3rd party (after market) producers of parts for this car. The car (almost) pre-dates the explosion of the Internet, so there is very little information available online.
What Great Fun!
In the end, it wasn't as challenging as it might have been due to the fact that I was lucky and leveraged the power of the Internet to gather to myself the right information and relationship assets to ease my task.
In under a week, I was able to collect all of the knowledge, assets and other stuff needed to resolve the many issues (great and small) that were afflicting this little, fun car.
Now Vego and I are in the final stages of testing and certifying that this vehicle is safe for her to drive on a daily basis. I have documented the story of the LRP and my adventures in bringing it back to 100% in a separate blog: http://2001-daihatsu-yrv-turbo.blogspot.hk/
As of today, I have resolved all of the mechanical problems. The only issues that remain are purely cosmetic, which I am arranging to have resolved very shortly by having the car detailed (interior) and buffed/coated/waxed (exterior).
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