Yep.
In 1998, I was driving to a Saturday shift at Nordstrom, and I got rear-ended.
My car got totaled and my nose got broken, but mostly I was ok.
As evidence of this, my main memory is sitting on the side of the highway, crying and saying, “I don’t have money for a new car!”
If I was able to focus on that, obviously my physical injuries were not my biggest problem.
I bought a new Saturn, paid it off entirely in a year and a half (hard work on our small salaries back then), and then promptly got hit again with a new baby in tow this time.
Mercifully, we didn’t sustain any physical injuries, but I was extremely displeased that my almost-brand-new car was now headed for the junkyard.
Neither accident was deemed to be my fault, so insurance did pay me for both cars. But as you know if you’ve ever had your car totaled, the amount the insurance company pays you never quite makes up financially for the loss of your initial car.
At the very least, they never end up paying what your car is worth to YOU.
Thankfully, I have not personally been involved in a car accident since that last one in the year 2000.
A 20-year streak of accident free driving is a serious mercy, and I hope it continues!
Yikes. Talk about bad timing on the second accident.
I was in several accidents when I was a new driver. Once I was coming around a curve and lady pulled out of a parking lot in front of me, and I hit her. Mercifully, I was only going about 35 miles an hour and clipped the front of her car, not broadside. There were no injuries, and that was not my fault.
The other two were. Backing out of our curving driveway and focusing on a car parked on one side of the driveway, I totally swung out and into the car parked on the OTHER side of our driveway. It belonged to our neighbor. Almost all my earnings from my summer job that year went to paying that damage off. The other one was when I was making a left turn across three lanes of traffic that were all backed up like ten cars deep waiting for a light. The drivers in the first two lanes stopped to make room for me to turn through the traffic, but there was a turn lane after them, with a guy driving who did not stop or see me. Again mercifully, there wasn’t a lot of speed involved and no one was hurt. That one was my fault, though, and I spent a lot of time paying off the damage from that one, too.
I am very glad my children are not going to have to learn to drive in a place like Tucson with crazy traffic. Definitely hazardous for the new driver.
Goodness!
When I was 16 I was my mother’s car home from school with my sister & a Kindergartner that rode with me every day. Actually, I had spent the day driving curvy WV country roads because we knew something was wrong & I’d taken to it the shop where my mom had bought it. (My dad was paralyzed & my mom was his full time carer so I usually did car maintenance) So on the way home about a mile from the school the tierod broke….it connects the steering wheel to the front tires….allowing you to actually steer! I ended up going up a steep bank & rolling the car on it’s side. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt so slid down the bench seat as the car rolled over. Very scary but no one was hurt. We had to crawl out the windows.
I was so in shock I started running back to the school passing friends in their cars as I went…I just could not think straight. Finally a class mates parent stopped & picked me up. I was so in tears & my cries were ‘My mom cannot handle this right now’. But we got it fixed & went on with life.
The only other accident was in a parking lot when I truck backed into me & kept going….pushing my car a few feet. No injury there but it was bad enough that I couldn’t turn left.
My husband got ran over by a semi on the interstate when he was in college. The guy reached down for something & just ran right over his car pushing it off into a field. It was pretty bad.
Oh yes. In college, we kind of shared my roommates’ parents’ minivan. Well I was driving it and changing lanes and as I looked over my shoulder to do so the car in front of my braked. I slammed into it. I got whiplash pretty bad. It was a very old minivan so they totaled it. I was very embarrassed and felt so guilty that I never properly treated my neck. Oh I wanted a time machine!
Just a couple years ago I stopped at a cross walk for a lady pushing a stroller and a very old lady rear ended me. The lady in the cross walk was fine. The old lady was so upset saying her husband just passed away. Trust me, I was super empathetic and nice.
I’m on my 3rd child driving. It truly is the only thing about having teenagers I don’t like. Scares me. It’s the other people out there that I’m worried about with my kids on the road.
I was rear ended twice. Both times were deemed not my fault.
Yes, the insurance never quite pays what you feel your car is worth. Sure I got the market value of my then 10 year old, 160k miles car (around $4,000 or so) but then came car shopping. I loathe car shopping. I always feel that every car salesman is a slimy worm of a person and I’ve left dealerships because I felt the sales staff were ignoring me or just not treating me properly. In follow ups I’ve told the sales managers that I wouldn’t consider a car from them based on how I was treated and true to my word, I haven’t been back.
We are car accident twins, almost!
I was 5 weeks away from turning 17, which in Michigan meant that I was 5 weeks away from getting my unrestricted license. (16 year-olds couldn’t drive past a certain time at night and I don’t think they could have more than one person in the car. I was stuck in that phase for another year because of my accident.) I was changing lanes as a lady in front of me was turning and my right front corner got her left rear corner. My car was a beast (’87 Cadillac DeVille) and it peeled my fender back, but nothing major. The other car just had a dent, I think. My 16yo self, though, just cried and cried feeling bad about what I had done to my car and what my parents would say. My parents were loving and gracious and said that part of why they’d gotten me an older, huge, beast of a car like that was in case I ever crashed. After that, my gray Caddy had a blue fender since that’s what someone was able to find to replace it. 🙂 Unrelated fun fact: my parents bought that car for $850 in 2002. My brother sold it for $850 ten years later.
Wow, that’s an impressive resale value on that car!
The year 1998 must have been the year for accidents. My only was in September of that year– the day after I made my first payment on my new Honda. I was in a parking lot and stopped at a stop sign when somebody backed into me without even looking behind her first! (My brand new car!!!) However, that little Honda Civic was with me until just last year; it was a good investment.
I LOVE Civics! One day when I get rid of my van, I really want a Civic with a sunroof. It’s my dream car! Ha.
My father made quite a bit of money from an invention (honestly, he was the stereotype of the penniless immigrant who makes good in America) and bought himself his dream car: a new Cadillac. I was coming home for a visit and wanted a rental car to drive because I was too nervous to drive my father’s dream car. True to form, he rented a brand new BMW for me. He picked me up at the airport and drove me to the rental place, since it was cheaper to rent there than at the airport, and had me follow him home. Short story, he stopped, I did not, and ended up basically totaling his car and the rental car. All he did was walk back to my crying self, still sitting in the BMW, to ask if I was okay. Never yelled or castigated me.
Fast forward 10 years. I am driving down a slick Alaskan road, missed a stop sign and broadsided a van. I was driving a pickup so very little damage but I had to help the other driver pry open her door—and out she steps, about 100 months pregnant. While waiting for the police, her husband showed up, understandably upset but then he began to rant and threaten to kill me, with his wife grabbing at his arm and saying she was fine…by then my husband showed up and the guy started threatening to kill him, too. The police showed up and arrested the husband because he started threatening the cop, too. It was a nightmare at 20 below zero. I contacted the woman a few weeks later to apologize and also to find out if she was still okay. She’d had the baby and all was well.
I hate driving.
I was having a lift home from a work Christmas party and there were 4 of us in the car. I was in the back seat of a 2 door. The driver turned right at the traffic light and a speeding car coming the other way went straight into us, spinning us around until we were facing completely the wrong way. My colleagues sitting in the front of the jumped out and made a run fir it forgetting me and my BF in the back. We are both 55 and have at least 20 years on our colleagues but you’ve never seen two people scramble out the back of a car so fast especially as we could smell and see petrol gushing down the road. No one was seriously hurt, just whiplash and a few bruises thankfully but one of us realised that if we had been killed, between us there would have been 5 motherless children aged from 7 to 19, shudder. We occasionally have a coffee in the staff room together and just thank whoever was watching over us that day (various faiths and an agnostic in the group). Neither my BF or I will ever sit in the back seat of a 2 seater ever again.
Ps I’m in the U.K. which is why turning right at the lights is into oncoming traffic!!
I had my first (and to date, only – touch wood) accident in November 2013 (I think). I was driving to meet up with a friend in a new-to-me town. I mis-understood the traffic light signals and was hit by a van. I only had a little car, so it spun me a circle and a half in the road, and when I opened my eyes again I was bumping to a halt.
Totally my fault. Luckily the guy in the van was very kind, and we called the police, and because I was so shaken up, they called an ambulance as well. I spent about 30 minutes sat in the back of the ambulance being treated for shock. It wasn’t my finest moment, but as my parents later said, “cars can be replaced, you can’t.”
I was shaken up and out of sorts for a good 2-3 weeks afterwards.
It took a good 3 weeks or so to get a new car sorted, what with waiting for insurance and all that. And although I did get money for my car, it only covered about a quarter of the cost of my new one, so it ate well into my savings.
Nowadays, I like driving. I only get nervous when I’m driving in the rain. Which is because I’ve skidded a couple of times in wet conditions, and had a couple of near misses. So now I’m extra cautious, and am always relieved to get safely to my destination!
Man. None of the scary stuff here. Thankfully.
I just back into stuff and hit deer. It’s been a while for either one, and for that I am thankful. The most damage I caused backing into something was a $50 taillight assembly on a guy’s nearly new Dodge pickup. The last deer I hit, gosh, 15 years ago or so!, also totaled my pickup, which I had driven most of its 317,000 miles. It was hard to let it go, but in hindsight, the decision was made for me, and that’s good.