On Sunday my wife was in a very bad car accident. My son was in the car with her. Don’t be alarmed. They both seem to be okay. I say seem only because I know that when I was in a pretty bad collision about seven years ago, I thought I was fine until a few days later, when the whiplash and disc damage began to make themselves known. Another story for another time.

On Sunday, my wife used my car (her car needed gas and she didn’t have time to stop) to drive my son to a friend’s birthday party. I was not attending. Just a minute after she left, the phone rang. I answered.

“Your car is totaled.”

I rushed to my wife’s car and drove three blocks away to find my wife and son and what remained of my car. My wife had been approaching a stop sign from inside our development, was still a car-length from the stop sign and the main road. Another driver on the main road, coming from my wife’s left, was driving way too fast. There were still huge puddles from all the rain the latest nor’easter dumped on us, though it wasn’t raining at the time. I guess the driver was making a right turn to come down the street inside our development and going too fast and hitting the puddle made him lose control. His car flew head on into the front left wheel of my car, on the driver’s side.

The side where the driver, my wife, was sitting. The side where the passenger, behind my wife — my son — was sitting. My car is a 4-door Honda Civic, a 2000, and only the left and right back seats (not the middle) have shoulder seat belts, so my son was sitting on the left side of the car, next to the door, in his booster seat.

The other car — a Nissan Altima — must have been going really fast. The front left wheel of my car was bent maybe 45 degrees under the car. My wife was out of the car when I got there — the driver-side door could open, but not all the way. The front corner of my car was smashed. The Altima’s front bumper was on the ground, and whatever was inside of it had come out. It looked like some kind of solid Styrofoam filling. After the accident, the two kids from the Altima had driven their car out of traffic to the side of the road. Two young kids, the driver maybe not yet twenty years old.

That’s the scene I pulled up to on Sunday afternoon. A witness to the accident, an older man and his wife, had stopped to provide assistance, and saw me pull up and start running toward my wife and son and smashed car. He must have seen the look on my face, because he held up a hand, a gesture to calm me and let me know that everyone was alive. We called the police and went through the questions with the officer when he arrived and waited for both cars to be towed away. The other driver was given a ticket.

The driver of the Altima had apologized to my wife immediately following the collision. He knew it was his fault. Everyone had jumped out of their cars to make sure that no one was seriously injured. And from the look of my car, it is lucky that no one was. If my wife had been three feet closer, five feet closer to the stop sign, if she’d been there a second earlier, the impact wouldn’t have been at the wheel, but the door. It’s all I could think about when I saw the damage.

If the accident had happened just a second later, this wouldn’t be a post having some fun with a photo of the rental car I am now driving. It wouldn’t be a post at all. Sunday night’s sleep was interrupted by dark thoughts. It could have been really, really bad. My wife has a sore neck, and I hope that’s it. I think she was lucky to be hit from the side, at the wheel, and not head-on, as I had been years earlier.

In my accident, I had gripped the steering wheel and pressed down on the brake when I saw the Jeep Grand Cherokee coming at me (I had been at a stop sign and went from bystander to participant when a driver who had been rear-ended turned toward me and she hit the gas instead of the brake). I was told that pressing the brake hard and pushing the steering wheel helped cause my injuries, as the force from the collision traveled through the car and into my body.

Sunday’s accident happened too fast for my wife to react. Maybe because it wasn’t head-on and my wife didn’t have a chance to brace herself, she was protected from the worst of it.

My son complained that his back hurt that evening, and he might have even bumped his head, which that night he said hurt, though how much of that was a kid responding to worried parental inquiries, I don’t know. By the next day he seemed okay physically. He’s upset by the whole thing. It was a powerful collision, loud, frightening for an adult as well as a child. My wife is shaken up about it, still can see and hear the crash. It doesn’t seem real. My son has alternately not wanted to talk about it, asking me to change the subject when I brought up the accident, and wanted to talk, telling us that he has been thinking about it a lot this week, even at school. Most of the time he seems fine, though, still the same happy kid, so I expect it’ll get easier with a little more distance. He’s actually doing fine. And he really likes the rental car.

The accident is completely the fault of the other driver, as was the case with my accident years ago. Insurance will take care of what it can take care of. It won’t be enough, though. My car had 120,000 miles on it and was ten years old. I am speaking of it in the past tense, but we haven’t heard officially that the car won’t be repaired. Since the car is old, my guess is it won’t be repaired. The cost of the repairs would have to be less than the value of the car. The Internet tells me the car is worth maybe $6,000. I know very little about repairing cars, but it looked like more than $6,000 worth of damage to me. And if that is the case, the insurance company will give me a check for the value of the car rather than repair it.

That sucks. After I got beyond the potential devastation the accident could have caused, and sighed in relief that everyone was alive, the financial reality and inconvenience became primary. The reality is that the car might only be worth $6,000, but $6,000 isn’t going to replace my car. I am not going to spend that much money on a 10-year-old car. I am not  going to buy a car with 120,000 miles on it, not knowing how long the car would last or how the previous owners had taken care of it. I could be throwing the money away. My car, though it had a lot of miles, was in great condition, and I expected to be able to get quite a few more years out of it. Years with no car payments.

Unless they decide to repair my car, I’ll have some money to put towards another one when they cut me a check, maybe a certified used car with fewer miles than mine had, but car payments will be returning. Insurance doesn’t really cover what the accident costs when it’s an older car. It would have been much better, if the accident were going to happen either way, for my wife to be driving her car.

First, because her car is a Honda CRV, a small SUV, which has much larger wheels and is much bigger than my Civic, it probably would have suffered less damage, though it still would’ve been messed up pretty bad.

Second, because it has a back middle seat belt shoulder strap, my son would have been in the middle of the car instead of next to the door. Fortunately, it turned out not to make a difference in this case, but sitting in the middle of the bigger car was the safer spot.

Third, because my wife’s car is a 2007 with under 40,000 miles, and a slightly more expensive car to begin with, the value of the car exceeds whatever the repair costs would have been, and the insurance company would have had to repair the car. Then, when our lease was up in a couple of months, we would have returned it as planned and gotten a different car that had not been smashed up. This wouldn’t have added a new car payment to our lives, but would have only continued a car payment that we were used to paying.

The main thing, of course, is that everyone is okay. And we’re fortunate too that we can afford the additional car payment, that we are both working, even if a new payment isn’t something we wanted. Knowing how bad the consequences of the accident could have been, I won’t complain too much about the money it will cost us.

So while we wait for the insurance company to give us a verdict on my car, and possibly take a couple of weeks to shop around for my new (used) car, our insurance provided us with a rental car. The policy only provides a small car. If we wanted anything bigger, it would have been an additional charge. I didn’t feel like paying extra. There was only one rental car on the lot that was fully covered by my insurance.

(Side note: Unless your insurance deductible is like $2,000, never buy the insurance offered by the car rental company — they try to sell it to you with the sales pitch that if you have an accident in the rental car you will have to pay your insurance deductible. In my case, that’s $500. The rental company charges $18 a day for insurance and if you purchase it you don’t have to pay for anything if there is an accident. Maybe this is worth it for a one-day rental or if an accident is likely, or if you can’t do math. Since I’ll have the car for at least a couple and as many as four weeks, the insurance would cost me nearly as much as an accident deductible would even if nothing happens.)

Anyway, my son loves the rental car. I think the older kids walking home from the middle school across from our development are secretly mocking me when I drive it past them on the way to my son’s elementary school in the afternoon. But my son’s friends started playing punch-buggy and trying to hit each other in the arm when they saw it in the parking lot at his school the first time, and he thinks it’s lots of fun riding in the green beetle, so I guess it’s worth it, despite the debacle of trying to fit a jumbo package of paper towels from the wholesale club into its tiny trunk the other day. 

Every time he sees the car, when I pick him up from school or in the morning walking past it in the garage as we leave for the school bus, he says “punch-buggy” and taps my arm and laughs. It’s the best part of my day.

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Tags: family & parenting, money // 2 Comments »