Guderian

Great idea, with the usual traffic in Pattaya these days the racers will be lucky to get out of second gear, lol.

Good luck to him, but unless he's got some savings stashed away or good medical insurance, he's going to have problems if he needs serious hospital treatment at some stage.

There's a lot more revenue to be earned by seriously taxing imports of cheap Chinese EV's. Maybe the Thai car factories wouldn't be closing down and laying workers off at an alarming rate if they'd done that to start with.

If you can't be bothered, there's a Thai guy in the Rompho market in Jomtien who does it - not the wet market, the other bit selling non-food stuff. If you can't find him just ask for the Fan Shop.

Blimey, I hope this guy doesn't end up having to do anything strenuous, he's a coronary just waiting to happen!

<eating popcorn smiley> I'm just waiting for the usual EV owners here to pop up and let us know that ICE cars are actually 10,000 times more likely to burst into flames than EV's.

The truth is starting to sink in...

This must be the fifth severe weather warning in five days. They seem to be working on the basis of it's bound to rain eventually and then they'll be proved right. Meanwhile...

Meanwhile in the real world, instead of the TMD's fantasy forecasts...

Thanks. I joined the FB Thai Corolla Cross Club and there's some interesting things on that but, so far, I haven't seen anyone mention this issue. I guess the Thais don't go on long holidays.

Looks like another brain-damaged case staying here on a Muay Thai visa.

Just to make it easy to avoid the drivel he posts, the OP should please change his board name to Vladimir_Brewsterski67.

Thanks, that's useful. When I was living in the UK I had a Vauxhall Omega and I used to just disconnect the 12V battery when I went away on holiday, that did the trick nicely. Here in Thailand, it seemed much more difficult to do that with the Fiesta so I had the GF start it up every week, and that worked OK too. I thought about the solar powered charger as the car is left outside under a car port, but there's plenty of light there. That would only keep the 12V battery going, though, I don't suppose there's an equivalent for the hybrid battery? And if there was, where would you connect it, I have no idea?

This may have been covered already, but I did a search and didn't find anything. I bought a new Toyota Corolla Cross GR Sport last October, just after I'd returned from my annual trip back to the UK. I'm very happy with the car and really enjoy driving it, but my next annual trip back is only around 10 weeks away now and I was wondering how to store the car while I'm away for about 6 weeks so that both the normal battery and the hybrid battery don't go flat. In the past, when I had a Ford Fiesta, the GF used to come down once a week and run the engine for 10 or 15 minutes while she was cleaning the place of dead leaves. When I took the car in for its last service in April I asked one of the technicians what to do and he looked very doubtful, as if nobody had ever asked him this before. He said that I needed to find someone to run the car for 20 minutes at least three times a week, and preferably to drive it. The GF can only usually get down here once a week, twice at the max, and I'm none too keen on letting a stranger drive the car while I'm away. I can't be the first person to have this problem, so what do you other folk with hybrid vehicles do when you leave Thailand for a month or two?

A week or so ago, a severe weather warning flashed up on my phone saying that heavy rain and strong winds were imminent. It was blue sky and sunshine outside, so I checked the TMD weather radar and the nearest rain was a shower over the hills along the Thai-Burma border, nothing else for 200 km in any direction. Whoever puts out these warnings never seems to bother to look out of the window at the actual weather before pressing the 'Send' button. lol

No problem, just get TAT to start another international programme to attract the dregs of the earth here as tourists, and in the meantime raise the taxes on retired farangs to keep the government's budget healthy and pay for more handouts.

The "monsoon mayhem" in my garden this afternoon... lol

Uncle Xi will be clapping in his palace in Beijing since so many Thais use Chinese phones.

Yet another reason to move elsewhere, along with their desire to tax expats to pay for the government's electoral bribes to voters, the disgraceful double-pricing in national parks, their refusal to allow expats to own any land at all, even when married to a Thai woman, raising her kids and paying Thai taxes.

Well look at how well that worked out during Covid...

It's currently 36° C with not a cloud in sight in Pattaya. I'd welcome some rain.

Good to see the Chinese joining the British, Swiss, Russians and Australians in the massed ranks of TAT's Quality Tourist programme!

Yes, indeed, the financial calculation is simple enough, but the personal cost of the upheaval is down to each individual to decide. When they were only talking about taxing remittances to Thailand it was a no-brainer for me, stay put and cough up whatever small tax they may decide I owed, if any. Taxing my worldwide income, though, most of which is offshore and tax-free at source, is another matter altogether. I'm not really interested in spending my retirement filling in tax returns and paying accountants and juggling my affairs to minimise my tax liability, I haven't done so for the last 20 years and see no reason to start now. The cheapest option would be to spend 5 months of the year in Cambodia or Malaysia. I could drive the car there and use it, which would save money over renting a vehicle, and then rent a house, which would be the only real additional cost over staying put in Thailand, as you have to eat and drink and use electricity wherever you are. Say the local equivalent of 30K THB/month, or 150K THB for each annual visit. The TRD doesn't have to come up with a particularly onerous tax bill to make the migration worthwhile, and then it's down to our own subjective estimate of the personal cost of the inconvenience.

To be honest with you, I'm getting quite depressed by this whole nonsense. Of course, it's been on the horizon for the best part of a decade, but I think we all forgot about it, or assumed it would never happen, so nobody has made any real plans. When it was restricted to remittances to Thailand I could live with it, but half of my income arises tax-free outside Thailand, and it'll be a cold day in Hell before I pay any tax on that. As the OP said, it might be all noise and bluster and nothing will change, but if that's wrong then it would cost me and many others dearly. My own affairs are hardly on the scale of Richard Branson, but I know one guy who worked for a big oilfield service company all his life and his pension, which is all paid tax-free offshore, is worth over half a million Baht a month. I doubt if he's going to sit idly by while the TRD draws up a bill for 2 million Baht in tax each year. The only sure solution I can see is to make sure that you're never tax-resident anywhere, which wasn't exactly how I imagined spending the last 10 or 15 years of my life. One reason for moving to Thailand back in 2004 was that they didn't give a monkeys about your financial affairs outside the country. Times have changed, it seems, and so maybe it's time to move on for good.

I've no idea, but as this is an initiative from the champion of Big Government, i.e. the OECD, I suspect it will only be available to governments.