The key to this adventure is that we have to have a car that is deeply underqualified for the trip that we are planning. First off, the engine. There are numerous golf carts that have engines bigger than this. We are talking about 997cc, that's about a little more than 2 pints of room for gasoline and air to combine, compress and explode. Top speed, when new, and on a good day is about 85 MPH.(120km/h). In reality, we're going to be luck to go faster than 55 (90km/h).

Second, maintenance documentation for our vehicle has been non-existant. We only know that the car has been "welded" recently. What exactly was welded remains a mystery. How it was welded, and when it is likely to fall apart, also unknown.

Third, there are no service manuals available in english for this car (at least not to us). That means we are going to have to channel the spirit of MacGyver, or at least watch seasons 1-5 on DVD to figure out how to repair this thing in the middle of a yak field in northeastern Mongolia.

Fourth, the only one with some knowledge of car repair (christian) also happens to be deeply impatient, and has been known to break three things for everything that he fixes. He also doesn't know how to read navigation buoys, but that's a story for another time.

The only real claim to fame that this car has is that it was the very first car pimped by MTV's Pimp My Ride. Exhibit basically said, "I pity the fool" who drives this car. Actuallly, the best he could say was that this car was a "toaster riding on donuts."

See this little summary of the episode.:

http://www.tv.com/pimp-my-ride/wyatts-daihatsu-hi-jet/episode/320957/summary.html

A brief blurb regarding this vehicle:

The Daihatsu Hijet is a small van and pickup truck made by Daihatsu. Despite the apparent harmony between the Hijet name and Toyota's naming scheme for it's trucks and vans (Toyota Hiace, Toyota Hilux), the name "Hijet" has been in use for Daihatsu's kei trucks and vans since at least the 1970s, over 2 decades before the 1990s merger of Toyota and Daihatsu. The name "Hijet" when transliterated into Japanese differs in only the first character from "Midget," the name of one of Daihatsu's other mini-trucks. In 2002, Daihatsu debuted the Hijet Cargo Hybrid concept, a hybrid car, in Japan using a 660cc engine. The car is based on the existing non-hybrid Hijet Cargo.

So, here are the official specs from Daihatsu Malaysia: