Hola! We didn’t plan on buying another car. But after Gizmo gave us one problem too many — and after finding ourselves spending a fortune on hire cars in Spain — we had no real choice.
So we went back to the UK, bought a left-hand drive Volvo C30, and drove the whole way home to Andalusia in one very long go.
Here’s exactly what it cost us — and why we made the decisions we did.
💸 The Full Cost Breakdown
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Car (Volvo C30, left-hand drive) | £2,400 |
| Import & registration in Spain | £1,200 |
| Travel (hotel, Le Shuttle, fuel) | £350 |
| Total | £3,950 (~€4,600) |
🆚 Why Not Just Buy in Spain?
The cheapest comparable Volvo C30 we could find in Spain at the time was around £5,400 (~€6,000). And that’s before transfer fees on top.
Buying in the UK saved us roughly £1,400+ upfront. But the saving wasn’t actually the main reason we went this route.
The bigger factor was confidence. Buying a car in a country where you don’t speak the language fluently is a real challenge — and we’d already been burned before. With Gizmo having gone from flat battery to bearing issue to leaking brake cylinder over the course of a few months, we knew what it looked like when you bought a vehicle without being able to fully verify its history.
In the UK, we could:
- Check the full service history
- Look up the complete MOT record
- Have someone we knew personally and trusted go and inspect the car before we committed
That peace of mind was worth the extra effort of the drive down.
🚗 The Journey — UK to Andalusia in One Go
We overnighted in Folkestone, then boarded the 5am Le Shuttle train through the Channel Tunnel. Jem was driving. Callum’s hair was doing what it does at 4:20am.
From Calais, we drove straight through France and all the way down through Spain to home.
We left the UK at 5am. We arrived in Andalusia at 3am the following morning.
Driving the whole way in one stretch was, as Callum put it: not the right idea. But we did it, and we were home.
✅ The Result
The car is now fully legal in Spain, on Spanish plates, insured, and registered. Left-hand drive means any friends or family coming to visit can drive it comfortably. We have a car we know the history of, bought from someone we trusted, at a price we were happy with.
It’s not the glamorous part of off-grid farm life. But buying a car when you live between countries as a UK family in post-Brexit Spain is genuinely complicated — and if this breakdown saves someone else a bit of research, all the better.
There were also rainbows on arrival at the farm. Proper double rainbows over the valley. Spain was, as Callum said through a face full of rain, bloody beautiful.
📺 Watch the Full Video
👉 Watch the full car import breakdown on YouTube
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¡Hasta la próxima! 🌻