This is my car the day I bought it (used) in 2009, all shiny from a fresh dealer detailing. It’s had more than its share of nicks and dings, as I wrote about a couple years ago.
This year, my poor car hasn’t been able to catch a break. In March, I took it a little wide backing out of my garage and broke off my side mirror. I bought a mirror off a junker on eBay and replaced it myself.
Then in April I was rear ended. I was waiting for an SUV to turn left on the Michigan Road, right in front of the 1852 Aston house. I saw a car coming up fast in my rear-view mirror and could tell there was no way he was going to stop. Sure enough, I got clobbered. It felt like justice that the other car was so crumpled that it had to be towed away, while I drove mine home. The other driver’s insurance paid for a shiny new bumper, which believe it or not cost over $2,000.
In August I was rear-ended again. The damage to my bumper was slight – a little cracked paint, a dangling trim piece. But this time I also hit the car in front of me. I only scuffed its bumper; the driver wiped if off with his thumb and didn’t bother to wait for the cops. But I came away with this dented fender. I decided that another body-shop trip wasn’t worth the hassle, especially when fixing the fender would go against my insurance, so I glued on the dangling rear trim and moved on.
Then in September, as part of the big sewer project in my neighborhood, the pavement was removed from the main road outside my subdivision. Dirt ramps were built to ease the transition, but I didn’t know that they had eroded considerably one evening when I sailed off the pavement at 25 mph. My front end hit hard, and all the ground effects on my front bumper broke right off.
The impact badly scuffed the ground effects but broke them cleanly off the bumper, leaving behind the mounting holes. I waffled for a week about whether to contact the sewer people about paying to repair the damage. After all, the car is 10 years old and has 150,000 miles on it, and as you can see the bumper already had some paint damage. But in the end, I decided to give it a try.
This latest story, at least, has a happy ending – the sewer people are going to pay for this repair, to the tune of almost $1,000!
This Toyota Matrix replaced a red one I wrecked while touring the National Road. Read that story.
