Where on earth would a family car cost you £88,000? The bad news is that COEs have reached an all-time high and in June this year it charted at a staggering S$94,502 for Category A vehicles (cars above 1,600cc) That's around £47,250 in sterling. To be paid before you've even shelled out for the actual price of the car. Oh, and did I mention that it only lasts for ten years? If you've just arrived with children and are in dire need of wheels, you had better hope it's a month with a large quota of Certificates of Entitlement up for auction, which should result in a lower price. The year-on-year fluctuations can be huge and we were lucky in 2009, when buying our first car, to have secured one that cost just S$5,700. I thought it was expensive at the time. An Aston Martin V8 Vantage S car (pic: SEBASTIAN DERUNGS/AFP/Getty Images) Buying cars second hand doesn't let you escape its grip, although it does help; the COE on a used car is not prorated, it is instead, "up for negotiation" according to Gary Hong from Autobahn, the prominent luxury used car dealership on Bukit Timah Road. Gary does concede though, that negotiations will be affected by current COE pricing. Clearly there is a need to reduce the volume of cars on this small island - anyone who has ever sat nose to tail on the Pan Island Expressway recently will agree with me - and the Certificate of Entitlement is the current way of doing this. The problem is, it could be argued, that in a country where some households only own a motorbike and others own seven identical red Ferraris, the people being hit by the sky high car tax are the middle classes, the "merely affluent," one car families who are making their way the best they can. A car, unfortunately, is still a necessity for some, despite the recent extensive MRT (Singapore's underground transport system) expansion. It's like a rock and a hard place. What would I do to reduce the number of cars on the road? In reality, probably just what Singapore is doing. Rowena Michaels is a writer who has lived in Singapore for five years. She is devastated to report that the car she's currently driving is a Hyundai, a silver one. Follow her on Twitter @changmohgirl