A week ago, a woman in my neighborhood drove full-speed into the side of my car, as shown below a few minutes after it happened. This weekend, I’m picking up a brand new, identical car from the Tesla factory. How could this be? Isn’t a cataclysm like this supposed to be more awful and drawn-out? I’ve been thinking about that.
When I was in college (which I paid for entirely on my own, incidentally, and it was an expensive, private college) I was nearly broken almost all the time. I distinctly remember going to an ATM once and being thrilled to be able to borrow $100 from the cash machine by way of my American Express card. I was taking out a literal $100 loan at God-knows-how-high an interest rate, because I wanted the luxury item of food to eat. I didn’t really have a choice.
The after-effects of being in an accident like the one I had depend greatly on one’s personal circumstances. I am not rich, but I’m no longer poor, either, so let’s examine a few of the differences between dealing with crap like this with very little cash on hand versus the alternative.
- My insurance has a $2,000 collision deductible. For about half the country, that would be a deal-breaker, because they don’t have $2,000 laying around to deploy.
- I’ve got a second Tesla. Thus, having a wrecked, disabled car that was towed away didn’t upend our lives. We had a different car we could use.
- I’ve got insurance in the first place. Insuring a car isn’t free. A portion of the population decides just to chance it.
- Even though my insurance company has declared the car totaled, they don’t just hand me a check to get a brand-new car. They pay me what the USED car (albeit 4 months and only 2,000 miles used) would get via a dealership and pay me that substantially-reduced amount. Thus, though not fault of my own, I can absorb losing thousands more dollars without wrecking my life.
- More significantly, it’ll be some number of weeks before the insurance company will remit the funds. I want a replacement car now, however, and I can afford to just walk into Tesla, hand them a cashier’s check, and leave with a car, knowing that before too long I’ll get most of those funds back from State Farm.
My point here is that this situation would be radically different if I was at the mercy of everyone else. Instead, I’ve got a choice. The net result of being slammed into by a careless driver is:
- Losing some number of thousands of dollars;
- Being without our main car for a week’s time;
- Dealing with dozens of emails and phone calls with insurance companies, body shops, and the DMV dealing with the aftermath of this crap.
Incidentally, I reached out to State Farm in the midst of all this to gently prod them into declaring the car to be a total loss, and there were two reasons for this. First, the body shop told me it would be MONTHS before they even had the parts, because apparently as pedestrian an item as air bags are in short supply and are fetching 300% retail prices on eBay. Second, even though the damage was apparently cosmetic, it’s a little unsettling not knowing if there’s some stress fracture or something invisible going on to make a car subtly “broken” in a way that the body shop can’t fix.
Anyway, I tend to be very much a silver lining guy, able to pull some kind of improvement, life lesson, or benefit from just about any circumstance, but, no, not this time. The whole thing is just a big ol’ pain in the butt. I’m just glad I’m in a position to make it a headache instead of a nightmare.
