@ae101rulez
Regarding the insurance, it is true that you will need valid insurance in order to ship your car back to Malaysia. In my case, my car was used daily from the day I bought it in the UK so it was never SORN-ed at any time. Be advised that SORN and the declaration for export are two completely separate matters, SORN just means what it states, a 'Statuatory Off Road Notification', but you will still need to declare your vehicle is for export and that requires another notification to the DVLA.
If you stay in the UK for more than a year then you are obliged to hold a valid UK driving license in order to insure your car. Let's say you plan to complete an average university course spanning 3 years - in order to drive or even insure a car once you are past your first year, you will need a UK license. Once you've obtained the license, getting insurance will be the next hurdle. Men aged 17-26 years and above have one of the highest insurance premiums in the UK as they are technically in the highest risk group.
An example - a Group 1 insurance car (1 litre Vauxhall Corsa) will have a premium averaging 2500 pounds per year for a man in the group I mentioned above. An 'average-level' performance car like the Civic Type R or the RX8 will be in Group 16....so try imagining the insurance premiums for that. And that is before you even try buying something truly 'hot' in Group 20 cars like S2000s, Evos or GTRs. In some cases the cost of the premium will be even higher than the cost of the car! I found out that some insurers even decline to supply quotes for performance cars. However, there are ways to get around this.
Method 1 is to find a specialist insurer for performance cars - quotes vary and you will very definitely have a sky high excess in the even of you needing to claim insurance for your car. This was the route I took and it was risky but hey, it wasn't as though I had a choice to be honest. Method 2 - insure your car under someone in a lower risk group (someone older, or a female) and put yourself as a named driver. Again, this depends on whether you actually have someone in the UK to bank on as the named person on the insurance policy. Method 3 is simply to not insure your car. I don't condone this for obvious reasons - if you get caught, you stand facing a hefty fine and your car may even be seized and crushed - yes, you heard me right...crushed. And pardon my French but uninsured bastards who get involved in accidents are the main driving force behind the ever-rising insurance premiums. So Method 3 is definitely a no-no!
The final consideration is almost Shakespearean in nature: to bring or not to bring? It depends on many factors. The most obvious would be cost savings - so do some research and find out the market price of cars back home before deciding to bring your car back from the UK. In my case, I found that selling my car would net me a huge loss (as cars depreciate really fast in the UK) so I decided to bring my car back instead, where even with the excise duty and shipping costs factored in, I could theoretically sell my car in two years' time in M'sia and still make a profit. Another factor would be cost - will you be able to accept not only paying for the car, but having to pay for the insurance premium, road tax, shipping fees, excise duty, registration fee before being able to use your car in M'sia?
Of course the rarer performance cars like the Evo, the GTR, Supra, FD3S will command a higher price in Malaysia as they are relatively rarer in this country. I would say if you can afford it, go for something more exotic as it then justifies the expense when you consider the equivalent price you would have to pay for one in M'sia. But again, do your research as if you buy a newer model, you may be subject to a higher excise duty once your car lands in M'sia. When I unloaded my car at the port, there was a fenced off section with imported cars that were unclaimed by their owners as they did not want to pay for the unwelcome surprise that is the excise duty!
I guess the moral of the entire story above is to know exactly what you're getting into before buying a car in the UK, whether or not you decide to ship it back to M'sia at the end of your stay in the UK. The mountain of paperwork I had to go through made me feel like tearing my hair out at times, and the time and hassle involved was not insubstantial either. However, at the end of the day, I felt it was all worth it!