Fundraising group to travel 2,000 miles across Europe in a £700 car in aid of Yorkshire Air Ambulance (From York Press)

This will be good for the environment then, racing around in clapped out old motors.

People moving from one side of the US or Canada to another will buy a banger to move themselves and their essential belongings, with most of their stuff following by a slow and cheap shipping company. They then sell the banger on at the other end if they can, or to a scrapper if they can't. Buying a banger plus a few motel nights en route is usually a lot cheaper than a one-way car rental and massively cheaper than plane tickets plus all the excess luggage. The trick is to get one in just about a good enough state to last the 3k miles - it might have expensive, MoT failure type things wrong with it, but as you don't intend to keep it long enough to have to face an MoT test (or the equivalent there), that's not a problem. A friend of mine did this when she moved from Charlotte to Anchorage: she bought a 15 year-old van with 300k miles on the clock for $800, put a small ad in the window of a supermarket a week after she completed the six-day trip and had sold it for $1,250 within two days! The only company that would even give her a quote for a one-way rental wanted over $2k, and she would still have incurred the fuel and overnight expenses.

I suppose the distances in European countries are so short that this approach wouldn't really work, but older vehicles can be kept reliably alive if you're prepared to put some time and effort into doing so.

Yosser Hughes wrote:
This will be good for the environment then, racing around in clapped out old motors.

Cheer up man it's for charity. I'm pretty sure there are worse things for the environment!

Fair play, doing their bit and all that. But is it being churlish to maybe wonder at the cost of this venture and suggest that a cheaper stunt would have seen more cash going to the cause? Maybe. But then I'd like to be sponsored for laying on a Maldives beach for a week! Any takers? :-)

Yosser Hughes wrote:
This will be good for the environment then, racing around in clapped out old motors.

Another one brainwashed!!!

Yosser Hughes wrote:
This will be good for the environment then, racing around in clapped out old motors.

Miserable bu**er. God forbid you ever need Yorkshire Air Ambulance. It needs money to survive and yowling about the environment won't be too comforting if the service is cut or shared further and they can't get to you.

I've seen them in action up close lifting a good friend of mine to hospital and they need support not moaners like you.

C'mon if we all could have a top gear moment of our lives we would. This is the same thing I'm just jealous of them.

Guy Fawkes wrote:
People moving from one side of the US or Canada to another will buy a banger to move themselves and their essential belongings, with most of their stuff following by a slow and cheap shipping company. They then sell the banger on at the other end if they can, or to a scrapper if they can't. Buying a banger plus a few motel nights en route is usually a lot cheaper than a one-way car rental and massively cheaper than plane tickets plus all the excess luggage. The trick is to get one in just about a good enough state to last the 3k miles - it might have expensive, MoT failure type things wrong with it, but as you don't intend to keep it long enough to have to face an MoT test (or the equivalent there), that's not a problem. A friend of mine did this when she moved from Charlotte to Anchorage: she bought a 15 year-old van with 300k miles on the clock for $800, put a small ad in the window of a supermarket a week after she completed the six-day trip and had sold it for $1,250 within two days! The only company that would even give her a quote for a one-way rental wanted over $2k, and she would still have incurred the fuel and overnight expenses. I suppose the distances in European countries are so short that this approach wouldn't really work, but older vehicles can be kept reliably alive if you're prepared to put some time and effort into doing so.

Don't you mean "some" of the people moving from one side of the U.S. or Canada?
When I moved from Chapel Hill, N.C. to Vancouver I fly on Delta, and our belongings were carried by rail!