We went three years in Abu Dhabi without a car. Aside from a one- or two-day rental for work. Then we did about 10 months renting a little car, by the month, from a local agency.

Today, we took the plunge into car ownership in the UAE.

That (above) is the vehicle we purchased, from a fellow expat who is on her way out of the country.

Why this car? Why this car now?

Abu Dhabi is not unlike Los Angeles. Mostly horizontal. Public transportation is pretty much limited to cabs and buses. Cabs are generally widely available and not expensive. Buses are dirt cheap but infrequent.

The issues with public transport are that six months of the year, in the UAE, you really don’t want to be standing in the sun for any length of time (anything more than five minutes), and you don’t want to be wandering around in the blazing sun to get to the nearest bus stop, even if more of them are equipped with A/C.

Moving materials around is difficult, too. Without your own vehicle. I recall trying to fit an Ikea item into a cab … and it fit by about 1-16th of an inch. Buying groceries also means finding a cab, and catching another, and then dragging your bags of stuff inside.

Also, as plentiful as cabs generally are, finding them late at night or in areas away from the heavily traveled main streets … can be tricky and involve standing on empty streets for long stretches.

So. A car.

Why this one? Why now? Because someone we know is leaving the country, and was reselling the car for a price that fell within our very modest car budget. And buying from someone you know seems a little safer; I am convinced the previous owners are not selling us a car they consider a lemon.

Still, I had resisted the notion of buying, even over the past year, because buying a car seems to be taking on a significant responsibility. (I am reminded of a former co-worker, who never wanted to own more stuff than she could fit into her VW bug.)

Yes, if we own it and use it even a year it ought to be cheaper than a rental (around $475 a month) over the same stretch of the time. But now we are in charge of making sure the thing runs.

And, the car is 10 years old.

A 2004 Audi A4 sedan, actually.

One upside to it? It looks much more like a real car than did our series of rentals, which included the Hyundai Accent and the Mitsubishi Lancer, vehicles which look exactly like what they are — low-end compacts. And the Lancer was a particularly underpowered, sad little thing.

A downside to buying this car? Those Accents and Lancers were, at least, of recent vintage. That puny engine was fairly new, and so was the rest of it.

The Audi has been around since George W. Bush’s first term.

Anyway, I have not minded obviously cheap cars, in my life, and I have a personal history of owning sturdy but cheap Saturns as proof.

But that was in California. Not in the UAE. And assumptions are made about a person by what kind of car he or she drives — even moreso than in Los Angeles. No. Really. The notion of good mileage, fiscal prudence … not so prevalent here. It’s mostly monster SUVs and luxury cars, and if you drive something less … you pretty clearly are not a person of significance.

So, even if the Audi has 153,000 kilometers (about 95,000 miles) on it, and even if this or that feature doesn’t quite work right — the driver’s seat has about a quarter-inch of give, forward and back; and at least one light on the dashboard is broken, and some plastic molding on the driver’s side door is coming loose, and the seats have some stains on them, and the accelerator has a spongy spot about an inch deep — hey, we’re driving an Audi.

I remember being 16 and getting a car. That was exciting.

This is a bit daunting. Now, any wrecks we are involved in (and I have been in two fender-benders, in cabs, and I just walked away from both while the cabbie got out and argued) will involve our car. We are buying insurance. We will have to do some maintenance and, we hope, not too much. And hope not to wreck it.

And whenever it is we are ready to leave the country, we will have to sell this Audi to someone else.  At some fraction of what we just paid for it.

So. There it is. Let’s see how it turns out.