By: Revanche

In which someone else’s mistake costs us bigtime

January 18, 2016

That car accident is just the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

They saw it coming but it was still a shock when The Driver didn’t even tap her brakes. I was looking down at LB when I sensed something terribly wrong and threw myself over LB at the same second That Driver slammed into the passenger door. What I thought I would protect LB from, being on the wrong side to cushion the blow with my mere flesh, I don’t know. Probably it was all instinct since I don’t remember thinking anything but oh $!&(#( 

Stunned, everyone verbally checked on everyone else. PiC was slightly panicked asking if we were ok because he couldn’t see us in the dark. I was about to be in serious pain, but it hadn’t registered as I checked LB’s limbs all intact and safe in hir seat, at the point of impact.

Ze had been gnawing on a plastic jar of nuts, hir temporary chew toy and maraca. The impact had thrown it out of hir tiny hands. Ze pulled away from my anxious checking, straining forward against the restraints, concerned only for where those nuts had gone.

Huge, shaky sigh of relief.

All that matters is that everyone was ok, but dammit, what an amazing pain in the everything it is to have someone crush into your car!

We had a plan, dammit

There’s something about humans planning and God laughing, right? (Jerk) Because that applies here. We’d wanted a larger car to accommodate our growing family but decided that we’d make this work for another 2-3 years. I wanted to squirrel away all the cash for a possible down payment.

Now what?

Now we do insurance. Now we do rental cars, and inconveniences, and trips to the shop. We have a very car savvy friend advising us on a few things, but the upshot is that almost everything sucks.

Our car is considered a total loss. It’s still amazing that no one was injured, because That Driver pulverized nearly the whole side of the car and it’ll cost twice the book value to repair everything, maybe more. The frame was damaged, both doors are flattened, and I’m pretty sure that the bumper was half crushed. The shop estimated the work to start at $7000 and that’s before they took anything apart to see the worst of the damage.

But book value puts our poor car at a mere $5500 despite the brand spanking new tires we literally bought the day before, and the other accessories that would normally have meant something to a prospective buyer.

At least That Driver did have insurance and so, even though she’s been MIA for two weeks refusing to respond to their calls, they’ve ruled in our favor that she’s 100% at fault and they’ll pay for everything including our $500 deductible.

That helps a little but not much. Our choices, such as they are:

• The car is a total loss: take the paltry payout from the insurance. Find a new car.
  • This sucks because PiC has been scouring Craigslist and his usual used car sales haunts and keeps coming up empty. There’s nothing out there that fits our requirements, not even close, and we’d have to spend $10,000 on a compromise.
  • We could take the money and just wait for a while but being a one car family means that I can’t run any errands during the week.
• The car is a total loss: take the paltry payout from the insurance minus several hundred dollars, take the car to be salvaged (complete with a salvage title), pay everything we received and maybe another $2000 to repair it.
  • This sucks because though we’d get our car back, which suits our needs, we’d be out of pocket $2000+ for a car with a salvage title so if we were to try to sell it later, it’s not going to tempt any buyer for more than that $2000, likely. If that much.
  • But it does give us a working vehicle so we don’t have to scour Craigslist for the next few weeks or months.
• The car is a total loss: take the paltry payout from the insurance minus several hundred dollars, take the car to be salvaged (complete with a salvage title), sell it to a shop for about $1000 which covers the salvage value the insurance deducted and gives us another $200 toward a replacement.
  • $200 is a lot of money when you think of just money in hand but is it worth the hassle? Either we have to trek to the DMV to get the salvage title processed, and then take it to the shop to sell the car, or get the insurance to process it which may take weeks while the shop holds the car. The shop has a $100/day storage fee that presumably would be waived but if the buyer at the shop changes his mind after 2 weeks, we’d be out $1400 instead of up $200. Personally, I’m no longer in favor of bothering with this sale – our time sunk into this fiasco is over a dozen hours at this point and it’s much more valuable than $200 to waste at least another day of work on it.

Want to guess what our final decision is?

That Driver’s moment of inattention has cost me weeks of pain, PiC dozens of hours in insurance wrangling frustration and car hunting, and cost us a great working vehicle that will cost more than several thousand dollars to replace. Awesome.

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