I know this has nothing to do with mechanics, but I want to know if I am the only one who gets dents on my car and if Im the only one who cares. I have a
94 New Yorker. They are rare here in Hawaii, specially the way I have it set up. I put 5 spoke rims with nice performance tires and spacers. Navy blue, mirror-tinted windows and chrome finder trims, flowmaster sound (only resonator) and two chrome tail pipes, so it has that sporty/luxury look. To start of with, I have my neighbors who live on the obove floors(apartment complex in the "getto"), they drop stuff on it all the time, cigarrate buts, s/flower seeds etc..kids playing with sticks, balls, bikes etc...then you have the small parking lots here in Hi. I know when I open my doors, I am careful not to hit someone elses cars, but when I clean my car (at least once a week) I find new dents. What the f*ck is wrong with people? Are they jealous? Just want to know if you guys who own newer cars get pissed off with people who do this ?
We all do, but unfortunately the automakers have not decided to standardize on a set height for rubber door guard strips, and for the angle of car doors. And even if they did, you have the people who jack their trucks up into God's ass and when their car door opens it impacts your glass window.
All you can do is park far away from the front door of stores, restaurants and businesses and such that you patronize. And don't be a fool and steal parking spaces and cut people off in parking lots and park straddling 2 parking spaces, that's a good way to get your car keyed.
i was working on a new pacifica the other day replacing the rear bumper cover that was damaged in a parking lot( body shop job) with the r.o was a police report and a statement from the owner from the note left on the car! we were admiring your pretty new car and just happen to get too close and smashed the rear bumper sorry! no name or number left with the note this is the exact reason the U.S is going down the tubes no one want's to accept responsibility for thier actions or anything for that matter
I suppose they wanted all the witnesses to think they were leaving their name and number. Too bad the owner didn't come back while they were writing the note. I guess the thing to do if you witness something like this would be to write down their plate number and wait until they leave and then check the note and add the plate number. Wouldn't they get a pleasant surprise when the police show up....
The test is 5mph or 10mph into a telephone pole with no damage to the driver and passenger, you stupid idiot.
They stopped using spring bumpers because people would hit the telephone pole and the kinetic energy would be put into the spring when it compressed, but then the spring would uncompress and transmit all that kinetic energy back into the car, throwing it backwards. So you would have the driver and passenger thrown against the dashboard when the car impacted, and then a second time when the dashboard was thrown back into the driver and passenger by the spring.
Bumpers today are designed as they should be - they collapse in the accident, and the kinetic energy is directed into destroying the bumper. You may think that a 10Mph crash is no big deal but it's plenty fast enough to knock a 200 pound person's teeth out when that 200 pounds is suddenly moving forward at 10Mph into a car immediately stopped in an accident by one of your spring bumpers.
New Pacifica, it's going to be completely insured, with comprehensive coverage.
So if the perpretrators owned up and had insurance, they would pay. If they owned up and didn't have insurance, the Pacifica's owner's insurance would have paid under uninsured motorist clause. If they didn't own up, like what happened, then the Pacifica's owner's insurance still pays. So in what scenario here does an insurance company not get stuck with the bill?
It's also unlikely that if a police officer saw the accident that he would issue a ticket - after all it's slow speed, in a parking lot. Parking lots are private property not a public street and the traffic laws generally don't apply. (I found that out when I was
16 years old and a very pissed off cop spent about 20 minutes yelling at me for speeding in a parking lot, and didn't issue a ticket. He was pissed because he couldn't issue a ticket, and told me why) Now, the property owner could file a civil lawsuit against a speeding vehicle owner - but most parking lots are "park at your own risk we are not responsible for vehicles left here" and if a property owner files a lawsuit, it jeapordizes this position. So that avenue is a dry hole too.
About the only scenario I can think of where the careless driver would be held accountable is if they didn't have insurance, the Pacifica's owner's insurance covered it, then filed a civil suit against the careless driver to recover the money. But the cost for doing this is going to exceed your bill, so no insurance company is going to do this. And if the Pacifica's owner happened to not be carrying insurance, and filed a civil suit against the careless driver, and obtained a judgement, if the careless driver doesen't want to pay by the time the Pacifica's owner spends the time getting a wage garnishment, he's going to have spent more time than it's worth.
What all this boils down to is that sometimes you just gotta say that an accident is an accident, and everybody involved pays for their own stuff. In this instance the careless driver probably did a favor to the Pacifica's owner by not leaving their name because then the Pacifica's owner is probably going to have a lot easier time working with their own insurance company than attempting to get a claim paid out of someone else's.
Actually, in Michigan there's a law which states that if the large fund maintained by all insurance companies jointly to cover catastrophic claims is *overfunded* due to a year in which such claims are low, they have to refund the money. I remember getting a check for $50 or $100 a few years back because of this.
That's amazing. However I would suspect that in most years, enormous effort is put into cooking the books so that any minor overfunding magically disappears. They probably only pay out when the overage is so big that even Arthur Anderson themselves couldn't cover it up.
And I might ask also if they reduced future premiums slightly so that the overage doesen't happen again in the future? Thought not.
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