We Bring Our Own Car, and It Changes What Everything Else Costs

Most families who do this fly in and figure out the ground transport once they land. That is not the wrong call. It depends on what your goals are and what you are trying to do. What we did was buy a car in Texas, pack everything we were taking into it, and drive to Honduras, and three and a half months later we are still driving it around Guatemala. On paper it is not the obviously cheaper choice. It is a lot of money parked in one object, and it comes with paperwork at every border that a plane ticket does not. It is also the decision everything else in our budget hangs off, and we would make it again. Here is the math in both directions, including the parts that argue against us.

The car, and what we would actually tell you to buy

We drive a newer low-mileage Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, all-wheel drive. We got a good deal on it. The car is worth somewhere around thirty thousand dollars and we paid less than that.

We bought newer than we had to. At the time we were worried about what it was going to be like down here. We just did not understand it yet, and so we felt like we needed something newer and low-mile to be safe and reliable. That was the reasoning, and we would not fault anyone for landing in the same place.

A while in, we would tell you something different. Most people down here drive older cars. The shops are used to working on older cars and they do it cheaper than they do it in the States. If your budget and your habits already include driving older, higher-mileage cars at home, we would not hesitate to do the same thing here. What matters more than the age is whether the car is common where you are going, and the list of common cars is longer than you would think. Anything Japanese is safe, and so is a lot of American. There are Chevys and Fords everywhere, plenty of Kias, and we have passed Dodges the whole way down.

We went with the RAV4 partly because we knew they were at least somewhat common down here, and that turned out to be right. You see them constantly. We wanted all-wheel drive. We were a little hesitant on the hybrid because we were worried about parts, and four months in that worry has not amounted to anything.

What it costs to run, month to month

Fuel has stayed under a hundred dollars a month since we left Texas. We get between twenty-six at the very worst and thirty-five at the best, and driving fast on the way down we were probably averaging twenty-eight to thirty. On Roatán we filled up roughly once a month and drove constantly, because nothing on that island is far in miles even when it takes an hour. Here in Guatemala the hills are harder on it and fuel runs about six dollars a gallon, so we fill every three or four weeks and it comes to sixty or ninety dollars.

Insurance is two policies. Local insurance runs about fifty dollars a month, bought a month at a time, in whichever country we are in. The US policy stays in force with the car listed as garaged and parked, and that is a hundred and sixty-four dollars for the year. That one does not really do anything for us. It is what makes the local policy work, so it is not optional.

Registration is Montana, under two hundred dollars a year.

All together, fuel, insurance, registration and maintenance, we are under two hundred dollars a month. That is the number for most of this trip and it is the one to plan around.

Islands are the exception, and Roatán was ours. Getting the car over on the ferry and back off again ran six hundred dollars, three hundred each way. That is a one-time cost tied to one place, and across the two and a half months we were there it still came to more than everything else the car cost us put together. It belongs on its own line rather than folded into a monthly average, because if you are not floating a car anywhere it does not exist for you at all.

What it costs to cross a border

Every country wants a temporary import permit and every country prices it differently. Guatemala's was a hundred and sixty quetzales, around twenty-one dollars. Honduras was about forty. Mexico is the one that scares people, because the first number you see is four hundred dollars. That is two separate charges and it is worth understanding which is which. The four hundred is a refundable deposit, tiered by how new the car is, four hundred for 2007 or newer, three hundred for 2001 through 2006, two hundred for anything older. You get it back only if you cancel the permit at a Banjercito module on your way out, with the car present, before the permit expires. Miss that window and the deposit is gone. Underneath it sits a processing fee, forty-five dollars online or fifty-one at a border office plus tax, and that one you do not get back either way. Those two figures are the current published rates rather than our receipts, so check them against Banjercito before you budget.

Our rule now is to plan on a hundred dollars for a crossing with the car and the family, on top of the Mexico hold. Most of them land closer to sixty, so planning on a hundred means we are never caught short.

Then there is time. Every border we have done has been right around two hours, plus or minus fifteen minutes. Texas to Mexico, Mexico to Guatemala, Guatemala to Honduras, Honduras back to Guatemala. That is just what it takes, so plan on it. It breaks down to about forty minutes for immigration and another forty for the vehicle permit. If you are travelling with an animal, add twenty more.

We doubt a bus does it faster. You still wait for immigration, and on a bus you wait for everyone else aboard to clear it too. The permit is a line we stand in that they do not. It is not the only line there is.

If you are travelling with a dog

Skip this section if you are not. Nothing else in this post depends on it.

We travel with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and she is not a small line item. Her border paperwork was sixty dollars crossing from Mexico into Guatemala and a hundred and fifty crossing out of Honduras into Guatemala. Same paperwork, more than double the price, and nobody explained the difference. She adds roughly twenty minutes to every crossing.

The bigger cost is lodging. Almost everywhere we stop while we are moving charges a pet fee, ten to thirty dollars a night on top of the room, and across a four-day drive that adds up to more than the vehicle permit did.

She is also one of the arguments for the car rather than against it. Flying with a dog across borders is much harder than driving with one, and with her breed a lot of airlines will not take her at all. It is not crazy expensive and it is not free either. The kids say she is worth it.

What breaks, and what it costs to fix down here

Before we left we made sure to get absolutely everything done on that car we could possibly think of. Shocks, wheel bearings, brakes, a full service with AMSOIL so we could go fifteen thousand miles on an oil change, and the transmission and gearboxes fully serviced. We put on good all-terrain tires that would hold up to impacts and hits. The reasoning was that we did not know how long we were going to be down here, and we did not know what it was going to be like trying to get service done, so we prepared as much as we could beforehand. Not everyone will do that.

Having now had work done here, we would not worry about it the same way. The rates down here are crazy cheap.

The one real repair happened on Roatán. A plastic fender had come loose and was hitting against the wheel. We had scraped bottom doing some off-roading and ripped out part of the underpanels, which needed straightening and pinning back up in there. We also had a set of stabilizer links for the anti-sway bar that we had damaged back in Texas, ordered, never got around to installing, and just brought down with us. A shop did all of it for nine hundred lempira. That is about thirty-four dollars.

After that we stopped worrying about the car. The thing you actually have to think about is parts. If your car is not common here you may have a harder time finding them, which is not to say it is impossible. You might just pay some shipping and wait a little bit. Tires we still cannot tell you about, because we have not needed any.

We have picked up a few little dings and dents along the way.

What flying would have run us

We priced it. One way, for the five of us down to Roatán, the best we could find was about four hundred dollars and change per person, before whatever the luggage would have cost.

Then you land and you still have to get around. A rental runs somewhere around a thousand dollars a month, and by the time you add fuel and insurance you are at twelve or thirteen hundred. Run that across the two and a half months we were on Roatán and compare it against a car costing us under two hundred a month plus the six hundred dollar ferry. We are not going to hand you a total, because ours would be a guess built on other guesses. The inputs are all here and the arithmetic is not hard.

The packing is closer than people think. The way we have the car loaded is not that unlike what we could do on a plane. Everybody has a carry-on and a checked bag, which is what we would have taken anyway. What the car adds is the homeschool bag, which is a big one and would have been an extra checked bag per person, plus two coolers, the dog, the dog crate, and some tools and other things we are grateful we could bring. We packed it that way on purpose, sized so that if we ever had to abandon the car and fly, we could.

What buses and tuk-tuks actually cost a family of five

We should be straight with you. We have barely used public transport, and the reason we have barely used it is most of the argument.

What we have done is a three-day church trip on a big bus, one of us traveling alone. A three-hour run each way on one of the little buses, which was three of us, also with the church. One taxi. A few ferries and at least one water taxi. Every bus trip so far has been part of the family, never all five of us together. The ferry has been fine, because the boys can stand at the rail and watch the ocean and that holds them the whole way. The water taxi was private and easy.

The problem starts with the number five. Five people do not fit in a five-person car with a driver. Five do not fit in a tuk-tuk. Four is really pushing it and we have seen it done, but we have not seen five, especially if they are bigger people. Five in a taxi we have not seen either. Somebody has surely managed it, and it is going to be a pain every single time. The little buses will pack in twelve or thirteen people, which sounds like it solves the problem until the one that stops for you already has ten aboard and you are trying to add five at once.

Then the price multiplies. A tuk-tuk here runs ten or twenty quetzales, a little over a dollar up to about three, which is genuinely cheap for one person and fifteen dollars for a family of five, every time you want to go anywhere. Gringo pricing sits on top of that in any town that sees tourists.

Roatán was the sharpest version. A taxi across the island is a hundred dollars if you are obviously a visitor, because it is tourism pricing. The tuk-tuks do not usually run clear across the island, and when they do it takes forever, it is a rough ride, and you are not carrying much with you. Every time we saw the little buses crossing, they were packed.

The one number we have that is not a guess came from a trip we never took. We looked at running over to Belize for a quick reset while we were on Roatán, and just the bus and ferry costs for the five of us there and back were going to be around seven hundred dollars. Holy cow. It was more expensive than driving, and that was about the end of the discussion.

There is also the part that is not money. On a bus you load everything underneath and hope you do not lose anything, and then you are collecting it all again at the other end with three tired kids who have been sitting for hours. Families manage that. We looked at doing it every few weeks for a year and decided we would rather load our own car.

What the car actually bought us

On Roatán we lived on the east end. A two-bedroom on the west side built close to American standards runs a thousand to fifteen hundred a month in the off season, and the same place owned by an American and listed on Airbnb runs over two thousand. We paid seven hundred and fifty, inside a small resort, with pool access and a guard at the gate. Outside the resort we think we could have found something closer to five hundred.

We could live out there because we had a car, and that is where the savings actually came from. Not the drive down. The rent.

It was not a Roatán fluke either. We are paying seven hundred a month here in Guatemala, in a village forty minutes up the hill from the lake towns where the prices double, and we are only up here because we can drive down whenever we want to.

There is a bus that will get you from Coxen Hole out to the Garífuna village at Punta Gorda, and that is about as far east as the buses and the taxis go. We hardly ever saw a taxi past it. Camp Bay, where we actually spent our time, is another fifteen to eighteen minutes beyond that at the pace we drive, and more like twenty-five in a tuk-tuk. Everything east of Punta Gorda is tuk-tuks and local vehicles.

Our groceries were walkable, which was lucky and is about the only thing that would have worked without a car. Anything the local shop did not carry was a fifteen or twenty minute drive, and a tuk-tuk adds thirty or forty percent onto that because of the hills. School runs would have been a nightmare and honestly would not have worked. A couple of times two of us drove into Coxen Hole for pizza, which Google calls a forty minute drive and we do in about thirty. A taxi would have had to come way out of its way to get us and way out of its way to bring us back, and they would charge for it. That round trip at eight at night is probably two hundred dollars.

Staying out on the east end and still seeing the west end is the whole trade, and without a car we do not think we could have had both.

What it rules out

The car is small, and that is deliberate, because anything bigger would be worse on these roads and worse to park. It does mean we are full. We are not carrying anything else.

There have probably been a few roads we should not have taken it on, and we took them all. Very steep, very muddy, big ruts and washouts. We are glad we have all-wheel drive, even though the RAV4 is not a serious off-road vehicle and we have been asking it to behave like one.

Two hours at every border is two hours, every time, and there is no version of this where that goes away.

Parking has not been the problem we expected, even in the bigger cities. A paid garage is usually about a dollar. At worst we park a block away, and that block is less walking than getting yourself to and from bus stops would be.

We have had one scare in four months. A night in Guatemala City where the parking we had been promised did not happen and the car had to be on the street, and one of us slept in it rather than lie awake listening for it. It has never been touched, then or since.

We have heard people say they get shaken down at borders and checkpoints, and we are not going to tell anyone their experience did not happen. Ours has been quieter. We have been stopped twice, and both times they looked in, saw a family, and waved us on. We have also noticed that a couple of times the person telling the story was driving something that really stood out. We bought a vehicle that blends in on purpose, and we do not think many people register that we are foreigners until they see us get out of it.

There is one caveat here that has nothing to do with money. Brittney loves having the car and does not love driving it in some of these places. She could if she had to and would rather not, so the driving falls to one of us. She got used to it on Roatán and did fine. She would do fine here in San José Chacayá, where the roads are small but it is not busy. She hated driving in Sololá, which is a bigger town with a lot of traffic and tiny roads. If you are a tentative driver, some of these places are rough, and rough in different ways depending where you are. Tight traffic. Roads built narrower than the traffic on them. Passing that takes nerve. Surfaces that are all bumps and holes for miles.

How we would tell you to decide

We did this for Hyrum first. Flying with our family has never gone well, and we assumed public transport would be much the same, so being able to leave when we need to leave, control our space, control the noise, and not be stuck on somebody else's schedule was the reason we bought a car instead of tickets. What we did not expect is that we would make the same call now even if that were not part of it.

If you asked us tomorrow, we would ask you three things first.

How big is your family? Three people is pretty easy. You can get three in a tuk-tuk and three in a taxi. Five is where it changes, because five is where you stop fitting in things.

What is your travel style? If you are coming down to sit in one village and you are not really going to move around much, the argument for a car gets a lot weaker and we would probably agree with you. We park somewhere for a couple of months and then explore the whole area hard, and that style eats transport money without a vehicle.

How comfortable are you driving? If your budget is flexible and you genuinely hate it, that is a real answer and we are not going to talk you out of it.

For our family, with the size we are and the way we move, those three answers all came back the same. Yours might not.

Questions we get asked

Is it cheaper to drive your own car through Central America than to fly and use public transport?

For our family of five, yes, and not by a small margin. Our car costs us under two hundred dollars a month in fuel, insurance, registration and maintenance. Moving five people by tuk-tuk, taxi and shuttle adds up fast because you pay per person every time, and a tuk-tuk ride that costs somebody travelling alone a dollar costs us fifteen. For one or two people the answer flips and public transport is genuinely cheap.

What does a temporary vehicle import permit cost in Central America?

What we paid in 2026: Guatemala a hundred and sixty quetzales, around twenty-one dollars. Honduras about forty. Mexico charges a processing fee of forty-five dollars online or fifty-one at a border office plus tax, and separately holds a refundable deposit of four hundred dollars for a 2007-or-newer vehicle, three hundred for 2001 through 2006, and two hundred for older. Rates change, so check the official customs pages for the border you are actually using.

Do you get the four hundred dollar Mexico deposit back?

Yes, but only if you cancel the permit at a Banjercito module on your way out, with the vehicle present, before the permit expires. Miss the window and it is forfeited. The processing fee underneath it is separate and is not refundable at all.

How long does a border crossing take with a car?

Every crossing we have done has taken right around two hours, plus or minus fifteen minutes, across four borders. Roughly forty minutes for immigration and another forty for the vehicle permit, plus about twenty more if you are travelling with an animal. We do not think a bus is faster, since you still wait for immigration and you also wait for everyone else aboard.

Is it expensive to get a car repaired in Central America?

It has been much cheaper than the same work at home. A shop in Roatán reattached a loose fender, straightened and re-pinned underpanels we had torn out off-roading, and fitted a set of stabilizer links, all for nine hundred lempira, about thirty-four dollars. The cost to watch is not labor, it is parts availability. A common car means parts on hand. An uncommon one means shipping and waiting.

What kind of car should we buy for this trip?

Something common where you are going matters more than something new. Anything Japanese is safe, and so is a lot of American, since there are Chevys, Fords and Kias everywhere. We bought newer than we needed to because we did not know what we were driving into, and having done it we would tell you that if you already drive older, higher-mileage cars at home, you can keep doing that here.

Can you sell a US-plated car in Central America?

People do it, though we have not. Selling to a local means they absorb the import tax, so expect an offer well below the car's value, commonly twenty to forty percent lower depending on the country. The other route, and the reason our car is owned and registered through a Montana LLC, is to sell the LLC itself so the registration transfers with it. That usually finds a better price, because the buyer is another traveller or expat who wants the car on those terms.

Does having a car actually save money, or just add convenience?

For us it did both, and the saving came from somewhere we did not expect. Having a car let us live on the quiet east end of Roatán for seven hundred and fifty dollars a month instead of the thousand to fifteen hundred the tourist side was asking. The car paid for itself in rent long before it paid for itself in fares.

May there be a road.