--- title: "Posts from Seoul: Living the S’pore dream in South Korea with a $15,000 SUV" url: "/commentaries/posts-seoul-living-spore-dream-south-korea-15000-suv" published: "2026-10-29T04:26:54.000Z" updated: "2026-10-29T04:26:54.000Z" section: "Commentaries" authors: ["Nicholas Yong"] tags: ["Korea","posts from seoul","expensive car","COE","Commentaries","Opinion"] --- # Posts from Seoul: Living the S’pore dream in South Korea with a $15,000 SUV It still sounds like something out of a fantasy novel, or a fan fiction story about Singapore so far-fetched it would be instantly dismissed: my partner and I have just bought a secondhand Renault Samsung SUV for just over S$15,000, all in. Yes, you read that figure right — there are no missing zeros. Seven years old, less than 60,000km in mileage and not a scratch on it: the car is almost “perfect”, as the dealer on a used car platform told us in his rudimentary English. As a friend wryly commented on my Facebook feed: “Wow, that’s almost the cost of a motorcycle COE.” Purchasing the car, however, was an arduous process. We closed the deal on a rainy Sunday afternoon at a dealership outside Seoul, with the help of AI assistant Claude and a translation app, alongside a very helpful Korean friend whom we called to translate towards the end. Extra paperwork was needed as we are foreigners, along with some back-and-forth over insurance terms. As is usually the case for a secondhand car, we also had to pay the full amount upfront. By comparison, a friend in Singapore recently bought an eight-year-old Mazda 2 with 123,000km on the clock — and it had just two years left on its original COE. The price: S$28,800, almost twice what we paid for our SUV in Seoul. She did make the purchase while being able to converse with the dealer in English, which now seems priceless in retrospect. Back in Seoul, with the constant need for translation, the whole transaction took us around three hours, with the car to be delivered to us two days later. By the end of it, the poor dealer — a grey-haired ajusshi (uncle) who was beginning to look visibly irritated — held his head in his hands while muttering in Korean, “I’m so tired. I haven’t even had lunch.” The following day, when we asked for help with changing the rear tyres, he agreed before texting (as rendered by automatic translation): “I respectfully decline to carry out any more tasks for you. I am very tired,” accompanied by a crying emoji. If this were a K-drama, a soft ballad would have started playing in the background, while we gazed meaningfully at each other in slow-motion. Instead, the Korean friends we showed the message to burst out laughing. ![Singaporean, Seoul, car ownership, secondhand car, renault](https://cassette.sphdigital.com.sg/image/stomp/ed80af3ad306ae11f900887c694fe6f854045a088b64ed803a3ee999af2529c6) ## First-time car owners I first got my driver’s license in 2001, back when I was a fresh-faced 21-year-old and dinosaurs ruled the Earth. I drove my parents’ car occasionally, but never bought my own as, besides the exorbitant cost, there was no pressing need for a vehicle. Now, 25 years on in the South Korean capital, we have the opportunity to easily transport our dog and take weekend trips to other cities. Pet taxis are just as expensive as back home, and while dogs are allowed on the subway and other trains, they need to be placed in a carrier. Given the myriad of stairs and escalators one typically needs to negotiate in Seoul’s subway stations, this can result in a great deal of stress, not to mention an unintended workout for your biceps. Besides paying perhaps a tenth of what we would pay for a car in Singapore, petrol is considerably cheaper here. The average price of petrol is currently around 1,900 won (S$1.83) per litre — fuel costs are heavily subsidised through a myriad of government measures — compared to between S$3.54 and S$4.34 per litre in Singapore. Certainly, buying a car would be a lot cheaper in many other countries, given the Republic’s unique — some would say outdated — car ownership model. A former colleague from the UK remarked that it was an environmentalist’s wet dream. ![seoul car ownership singaporean](https://cassette.sphdigital.com.sg/image/stomp/dcbc0631127989deae2824851d80df763d086ee09130aa6f41a8dd5140163c90) *Traffic rules are different in Seoul, South Korea.* We are still adapting to a left-hand drive, not to mention different — and sometimes confusing — traffic rules, constant heavy traffic, and soon, driving in winter. There is also no escaping multiple tolls, parking and miscellaneous charges, including Korea’s equivalent of Electronic Road Pricing in certain areas. Then there is the unpredictable human element. “Drivers in Seoul are not very nice,” said a Korean-American church friend. Funnily enough, when I did a lifestyle story about road conditions back home ages ago, everyone I spoke to said the same thing about Singaporean drivers — but never about themselves. ## A car is freedom We all know it: unless you are “high SES”, as netizens are so fond of saying, owning a car has become increasingly unaffordable in Singapore. With the latest news about COE categories merging, and my old colleague Christopher Tan’s prediction that this will only further drive up COE prices, we feel even more privileged to be first time car owners. Taking the MRT, bus or even a Grab is good enough — but it’s still nothing like driving your own car. As a Singaporean friend who just left Seoul for good remarked to us, “Once you have a car, the world will open up.” The possibilities are indeed endless: besides weekend trips, we can have spontaneous dinner dates or late night excursions, bless friends with a lift home, or pick up relatives at the airport. In that cosy, warm little bubble, it almost feels like that line from Back to the Future. “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” “Posts from Seoul” is an occasional series by Nicholas Yong, a Singaporean journalist and the author of Seven Sacks of Rice and Other Baggage.