Okay, we've started to look around for a desert car, something that we can take out on the sand and not worry too much about. Taking your nice new car into that environment is really quite a risky business financially. Not just the wear and tear, but also the inevitable prangs. Now when you start to look at the second hand market you are immediately aware of some of the pitfalls. One is the clock fiddlers who alter the odometer to give you a false sense of how much use the vehicle has had. The other is the nature and number of accidents that it might have had. There is a website that can help you with the latter. It is a service by the Abu Dhabi Police and it lists the accident history that they know about, based on the chassis number. You can easily find the chassis number on the car registration card, and pop it into the website
http://www.adpolice.gov.ae/trfesvc/EN/accidentinfo.aspx (do it from your mobile phone while checking out the car) and you get the type of collision, date, the location (in Arabic), and the model of the vehicle. I've modified the attached image for privacy reasons, as it shows a real event, which if you have read previous post you will know the origins of!!! But it is nice to know you can verify the Abu Dhabi history at least. Of course if it got knocked up elsewhere, you'd still be in the dark (I imagine).
