Yes the trip can take anything from 2.5 to 4 hours plus depending on the traffic, but what to do?
The train leaves from Thonburi station, itself a 30 minute cab ride out of Bangkok if there is no traffic. Also there are only a few trains a day, and none in the evening.
Our house is not in town, but nearer to Sai Yok (another 45 minutes drive past Kanchanaburi town) and 15km away from the nearest train station where there are no taxis or whatever. I have taken the 0730 train from Thonburi to Wang Pho station a couple of times on a Saturday morning in the cool season (there is no aircon as all the carriages are third class) and while it is quite pleasant, the one way journey from door to door took about 5 hours.
The good news is that the motorway between Bangkok and Kanchanaburi should be finished early next year which should significantly cut the journey time by car.
The Toyota Cross is a fashion accessory, a faux SUV which in itself is simply an ordinary saloon riding an inch or two higher.
Stop fucking about and get yourself a Honda Civic - you don’t need 4WD and everything else is marketing.
A new Civic is all the car you will ever need.
SBF, now you have decided against 4WD and gone for an SUV type car then SA is right, the Toyota is a lifted corolla. If you are still looking at an SUV then as previously suggested the Honda HR-V is a great vehicle.
I note you are looking at 2nd hand, how long are you looking to keep the vehicle? and roughly what budget are you looking at?
Is a new Honda HR-V still available other than the electric version, please?
Generally, you cant go wrong with a Toyota SBF. Parts, service and good reliability. Personally I am waiting for something more environmentally friendly.
I'm not sure how long it will be before the first car with a nuclear fusion reactor will hit the market though.
Nothing wrong with the Honda City, is a great car and looks good IMO , I don't know why the Dr. would have an issue with that. He is probably drinking the cheap stuff again.
When we lived in NY where we got a lot of snow, we always owned a Subaru Impreza. We liked it so much , every few years we would trade it in and get another. Other than scheduled maintenance, we never did anything to it.
I also owed a Dodge Ram pick UP 4x4 , the Subaru was actually better in the snow, except if the snow was wet and so much that it build under the Impresa that was kind of low, Other than that it was like a snowmobile. My first car was a Subaru Brat.
I would not buy one in Thailand, first because you will never really need the 4x4 option. You might go off road once or twice, but that's it IMO. And as others said, they dont have the dealer network here.
You cant go wrong with a Toyota. After we moved to Florida where a 4x4 was unnecessary, one of our cars was always a Toyota Corolla, never has a problem with them also.
I know I am going to get a lot of flack over this, but the Chinese have some very nice cars right now, I looked at the Haval H6 hybrid and it was brilliant IMO and well priced , I did some research , and it got some very good reports.
Anyway, good luck on your car purchase. Let us know what you got in the end.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
Arthur Daley
Utter nonsense, and not for the first time from the forums self proclaimed baht bus riding expert on everything and nothing.The Toyota Cross is a fashion accessory, etc.etc.etc.
The Toyota Cross is hardly a fashion accessory. It is a roomy, robust and reliable vehicle. The extra lift it possesses will certainly come in very handy during the temporary flooding that regularly occurs on the roads here during the rainy season and that renders lower riding vehicles, (and especially electric cars with their batteries fitted in the lowest parts of the car) useless due to water ingress to the engine and wiring looms.
Thailand is without doubt the perfect place for a higher riding vehicle.
Last edited by taxexile; 13-02-2023 at 10:23 AM.
I recently decided to buy a new car. I wanted hybrid or fully electric and I looked briefly at the GWM, then decided not to test drive one. Mainly I didn't like the sun roof, which was not optional. That is a problem waiting to happen in Thailand, in my opinion.
I fancied the Scooby - but there was no hybrid.
The choice seemed to come down to the Cross or the HRV. The Toyota dealer was a bit "whatever", they didn't have one for a test drive and they didn't know when they would get one, we just got a shrug and a smile. So we went for the HRV. Of course, Toyota called us for a test drive the day after we signed up for the Honda. Too late.
The car has been good as gold and just had its first 10K service. I have no regrets at all, even though there are a couple of things about it I would change if I could. The moonroof is pointless, contrary to the Thai language reviews on YouTube the midday sun does come in, so I now keep a hat in the car. The aircon is great, it isn't a temperature problem, it's about the sun on my head.
The HRV is super smart, once I figured out how to use the flappy paddles to recover energy we are getting 23km per litre in normal driving.
The smart headlights are better than I expected, I am fascinated by the way the car can decide which lights ahead are vehicles and which are not. However, totally useless around here where the locals ride around without any lights. The car isn't smart enough to spot an unlit sa-ling coming at you.
Performance is beyond adequate for my needs and high speed cruising is comfortable. One weak spot is power delivery in sweeping bends, sometimes it is slow to respond to small accelerator input at speed and I find myself drifting wider than planned. Maybe it would be better on the 'Sport' setting, I plan to take it over the hills to Udon when the gf is not in it one day. (Or I could simply take the bends more slowly.) It has plenty of power, floor the throttle and it will overtake pretty much anything other than an inter-city van. It just doesn't behave like my old TVR, where you pushed the throttle a little and the response was instantaneous. It is a bit like turbo-lag, maybe the engine management system is so smart it thinks that little extra weight on the pedal is just the driver fidgeting and it waits a while to be sure. This is a detail, more about my driving style than a problem with the car.
Overall very pleased, until the gf rearranged the bodywork by hitting a dog in the dark. Then it transpired that my dealer doesn't do repairs, so it is multiple trips to Udon Thani for quotes and repairs.
There are other choices, I am happy with this one.
I have never understood why people have sunroofs, having one in the tropics is just barking.
I was waiting for the Mrs pranged it story, mine has managed to ding all three new ones of ours within a month of getting them
SBF a lesson in dealers there too re repairs.
The GWM has a sliding sunroof. You just know that the combination of sun and rain in Thailand is going to kill those seals eventually.
The HRV is a 'moonroof', which I didn't know until they told me is a fixed glass roof. There are detachable roof liners, never likely to be detached on my car. Those in the back are opaque, which is okay but of course the interior is still getting heat from the sun through the glass. The front seat roof liner is a fine mesh, which lets in the sun to a degree. There seems to be no opaque option. Maybe some OEM option will become available.
It was almost inevitable that the car would hit or be hit by something, I was only hoping it might be a year or two down the line. She had to go temple dancing at 0530 on one of only 3 rainy mornings we have had in two months. Her night vision is probably worse than mine, which ain't great, and dogs in the road are common in the early hours. The planets aligned perfectly. Next up, my lottery win.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tax, 16 centimetres clearance ain’t going to get you through floods in Thailand, you silly old prat.
Corolla Cross is a marketing exercise targeted at women easily deluded into thinking it is a rufty-tufty machine magically made safer, bigger and tougher because it’s an SUV. It ain’t. It’s like any other SUV, a jacked up, squared off hatch back, a marketing ploy that the Nissan Qashqai started all those years ago.
I thought SBF had more nous.
The hybrid Honda Civic carries more stuff, seats the same number of passengers, handles better, is more comfortable and returns fine fuel economy.
And it’s faster too
Thanks to those who contributed to this thread in a constructive manner.
It's just a shame that there is so much toxicity on TD these days. But you all knew that anyway and I had just forgotten it.
I lost my vestal virginity at the tender age of 19 to a farmer's daughter who drove a small white manual Subaru hatchback
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