What are my best options for buying a car? ( I am coming to Warsaw to study )

Hi,
I'll be coming to Warsaw to study for 2 years and I'll be needing a car (not just for city driving where I can use public transport often) but traveling home after x months or short trips elsewhere.

I'm from Serbia and thought of few ways to do this:
1. Buy in Netherlands or Germany and register it there in friend's name(who is a citizen) and drive it like that with an authorization paper(forgot the word for it)

2. Drive my car from here but I'd rather not out of fear of it being stolen and our insurance here is ****. Foreign cars are more at risk of being stolen but I guess n1 would also fall under this, but its generally cheaper to buy abroad, register too probably, not sure about the insurance.

3. Buy and register there on temporary basis since I'm not a resident, which from what i gathered can be a long and annoying process, and I'm well aware of Polish car salesmen and all their scams, which are also as common here.

What do you guys recommend I do, what's the best way to go about this? I probably don't know about some law that will stop me from doing some of the options above so hopefully you fine folks can enlighten me :)

Serbia is also not in EU if that matters.

Don't. Take taxis everywhere. There's a firm in Sopot running only old mini vans and carriers.
They are dirt cheap. embarassing if you want to take the tottie home admittedly, but it's been proved that this is the way to go to save a shilling, and she'll thank you for it :))

If you are really concerned about car theft, buy a cheap but reliable car in Serbia and drive it to Poland. "sell" your car to a friend in Poland, he can register it and then you drive on his insurance. Job done.

I also bought a car for my 2 years of studying in Poland. Bought mine in Germany... was pretty expensive to register in PL but half of that was because of the 3 liter engine :P If you can find a good buy in Poland then you can save some money but even most Polish mechanics will tell you to go west to buy. If you want, let me know your budget for a car you want to buy and I can recommend a few. I spent a while researching before I made my buy and just sold it for almost the same price.

@Dougpol1
I took a taxi few times and it wasn't that cheap, even if I found a cheaper one doing it every day or so would prove to be too expensive in the long run.

@Maybe
Yeah but then he would have to import in and pay all sorts of fees and **** that's too bothersome. I might just bring a theft insured car from here but it still feel unsafe, all big cities do I guess especially ones here in Eastern Europe.

@warszawski

Thanks for the link. Seems like there's ton of things to be done, maybe because I've never done it over there and it seems more complicated than it is.

@clifborder4fm

I'm not sure about price, I wanna get something cheap but what I can sell later without much loss or back home, maybe like vw polo, peugeot 206, renault megane etc, with as small diesel engine as possible, that's about the only thing that sells here alright. Kia Sorento isn't a bad idea, good one can be found under 4k euros in Germany/Netherlands. I don't know how's the market over there, only know my friend who recently bought a car saw a ton of them before buying and all by private sellers were either fixed from some big damage, had mileage returned or overpriced.

I don't know, kinda feel the best would be to take a car from here but it's still a bit scary :/

Any more ideas?

I do play tennis, trained when I was a kid but haven't played in a while. And yeah, all of my options have pros and cons, guess I'll add this to a list of "do what feels best when time comes". Thanks everyone

That's stereotype. Poland has the lowest number of car robberies per capita in Europe. Meaning - the safest country. According to:

But indeed to other countries of the Old Continent Poland stands out in a negative way ?

Over the years, a trip to the Polish spent awake at night even the Germans , who never ever want to visit our country by car. The situation is , thankfully, improved the organization of Euro 2012 in Poland - many Western supporters for yourself convinced that the streets do not run with us polar bears and park new Volkswagen in the center of Warsaw and Wroclaw is not at all synonymous with back home by train .


That means that each 241st citizen of Denmark lost his car and only each 2303rd citizen of Poland his in 2010.
One could think that it's because of low or high car ownership in Poland, but number of cars per capita in Poland is similar to other western countries.

I guess above ranking is eurostat data converted into per capita values.

Below is a map showing number of stolen cars in Poland per voivodship. As you see the more east the safer and capital is the most dangerous.

Those statistics are usually under reported or skewed, and it's not just the car theft I'm worried but breaking in, wheel theft etc. I'm always paranoid about this, even in my hometown, let alone bigger cities.

Either way, I'll decide right before I come.