Knock on simulated wood (I have an Ikea desk), I’ve had pretty good luck with my cars not getting messed up outside of a collision. The only really significant bummer I’ve experienced was the golf-balling my wife’s then month-old RAV4 received when we were caught in an unpredicted hail storm on the way back from a movie, which suuuucked (the hail, I mean, but as I recall, the movie wasn’t great either).
I do, however, have plenty of second-hand experience with cars getting damaged due to bad luck or carelessness or just plain stupidity, including a tree mishap like the one in the top pic – RIP Uncle Charlie’s Buick Regal.
I once saw a person slide a chair into their hatchback, back-first and legs out, and then shatter the rear window because they didn’t account for the legs extending beyond the slope of the hatch. Also shattered: their spirit.
In college, a buddy of mine procured spray paint for an art project before a few hours’ worth of classes one day in early June. When he returned to his car, an art project of a different sort had been completed in his absence as a can of flat black had split in the heat and graffiti’d the interior of his Sentra.
And then there are the more minor, but no less irritating and possibly heartbreaking annoyances such as kids (or pets, which are like kids) hurling up breakfast all over the back seat, spills of stain-producing liquids onto light-colored upholstery, and the like.
Oh, nice! Antti just piped in on Slack:
I once had a hailstorm wreck all horizontal surfaces of my month-old lease, on a work day that could have been an email. When I got the $4000 worth of PDR performed on the car courtesy of the insurance company, the guy doing it leaned on the headliner and broke it and stained it trying to fix it. He ordered a replacement one and the delivery driver left it in the rain outside the shop. He eventually found another headliner in time for the lease return as I just wanted the car gone at that point. Dents did disappear though.
I was mildly annoyed when I accidentally used the rear wiper on the dry and dirty glass on my current lease, but then I remembered what happened to the earlier car and figured I can live with it. Still, I’d hate scratching the glass!
What’s the worst not-a-crash incident … wait, now Thomas is hitting me up:
There was the time the belt tensioner on the Crown Victoria grenaded, lodging the pulley against the timing cover and wearing a groove in it. Then there was the time it sort-of caught fire. Then there was the time wheel studs sheared over a nasty pothole. Then there was the time the transmission gave out …
What’s the worst not-a-crash incident you’ve seen or experienced yourself? See you in the comments.
When I was learning to drive I was given my grandfather’s old station wagon to start on, which I loved deeply. After the family decided the car wasn’t worth maintaining anymore it was sadly replaced with a white-on-beige 1998 Camry 4-cyl slushbox with wheel covers (and gold emblems). I still enjoyed getting around, but I had no love for the car itself.
After years of advocating for repairs on the old wagon, I was told in no uncertain terms by my dad that he would take care of all maintenance items on the Camry I shared with my sibling and not to bother him with requests.
After a several months I noticed some soot around the exhaust and the car was starting to be down on power. I mentioned the problem to my dad, who got irritated and reminded me to let him handle issues with the car.
One cold night in December I was trying to drive up the hill to the house that I’ve driven up many, many times – at WOT the car would barely crawl up the hill. Then there was a bang, the engine died, and every warning light came on. Under the hood, the engine had seized, ripping a hole in the side of the crank case; the engine was now resting on the accessory drive against the inside of the fender. I used one of my very-expensive cell phone minutes to call my family and ask for a ride, only to be told to “try to get the car home” and I explained carefully that there’s a hole in the side of the engine and all the magic smoke got out.
The car was towed to the shop to be diagnosed. Apparently my dad had forgotten that cars require oil changes and it had been driven for 14 months by two teenage boys without any maintenance at all.
Dad ended up paying to put a rebuilt engine in that car and it continued to serve the family for many years. He also learned to listen to me when I told him there was a problem.
I had an E46 BMW 320d Touring as my first company car. Parked it one Saturday night in the city centre and when I picked it up on Sunday the fuel filler flap was open and the fuel cap was missing. There was a black residue around the filler so I assumed someone had shoved a rag in and tried to set fire to it but as it was diesel the rag just burned out. Several weeks later the car went into limp mode which resulted in the turbocharger being replaced; the problem recurred and they thought it was the ECU so it got new one of those, next they suspected a bad batch of fuel injectors, after those were replaced all was well. In total eight trips to the dealer. Only after a few months did I start wondering if someone had actually poured some sugar in the tank that Saturday night and that could have been the root cause. Who knows? It was all under warranty with the BMW dealer throwing parts at the car, and I got to try pretty much every current BMW or Mini as a loaner!
The transmission on my first car was killed when my dad used it to tow my mom’s car for a major repair.
Come to think of it, it involved a Mansfield bar! (I guess this is considered a crash, but just go with it please)
One day I came out of the office I worked at, to find my SX4 awkwardly no longer in it’s parking spot, but rather sitting near the entrance to the parking lot, at a strange angle, precariously close to the busy road we were on. Weird.
I went back inside to interrogate my coworkers as to what they did to my car, as there were a couple of people there who were, I would say, mischievous dicks. Nobody fessed up so I went back out to the car to move it back to a parking spot.
What I discovered were tire tracks from the parking spot to where it stood, like it had been pulled there instead of driven. Then I found a strange, perfectly square hole in the rear bumper, with some other scraping around it.
Turns out (upon video review), a truck on turning it’s way of the parking lot, rotated in such a way that the side of the Mansfield bar punctured my rear bumper, and dragged my car across the parking lot, and luckily released it right before dragging it into the road.
The trucking company sent me a check for it. I never repaired the bumper.
My 2005 Ford Focus wagon had a front wheel fall off due to advanced rust while at Canadian Tire and after they told me that it was too rusty to work on and the tech there didn’t even want to stand under the car on the lift due to the rust.
I don’t know that I’ve had anything truly awful happen to my car, but what I can recall includes:
Losing three car radios to thieves (along with related damage to windows, dash, locks) when I lived in New York City.
Having a parts thief who owned a Mk1 GTI pry various parts off of my Mk1 GTI while it was parked in my parents’ driveway. I chased him around the block and into the woods of Kissena Park. The cops brought him and his dad to my house later that evening and I opted to not press charges so long as his dad paid for the damage.
Had to replace the power window regular assembly on my Mk4 VW Golf three separate times. It is a 120+ step procedure that is a royal PITA, for which dealers quoted me $500 for labor charges alone (this was many years ago). I wound up doing it myself all three times, but the experience keeps me from ever buying another modern VW product.
The only new car I ever got, a ’98 MB CLK 320 had to go back to the dealer for problems/repairs seven separate times the first year. I got rid of the car after that.
The catalytic converter on my ’79 VW campervan melted when I was driving cross country, blowing oil out of the top of the engine and reducing power to a crawl from its normal almost-a-crawl uphill progress.
This was a crash, but worth mentioning:
When my ’69 Corvette Stingray convertible 427 was hit by a full-sized Buick and literally knocked down the block while it was parked in front of my parents’ house. The girl driving the Buick was underage and it belonged to her boyfriend’s mother (he was the front seat passenger at the time). Dealing with the insurance company took the better part of a half-year.
I’m sure there are a couple other incidents that I’ve unconsciously blocked from my memory…
So many sad tales of woe in the comments. My sympathies everyone.
In 1983 I was on my way to my wedding rehearsal and dinner in my ’74 BMW Bavaria and was about halfway there with my brother, parents and the officiant when the head gasket blew. My future FIL came and picked us up and we were in time for the rehearsal and a nice dinner. But our honeymoon was starting the next evening and we had places to go so the BMW sat with water in the bores behind a gas station we had limped to and my other car, a ’71 Peugeot 504, was happy to step in and performed its job flawlessly.
When we got back, I limped it to a specialist garage who said the engine was going to need a complete overhaul. That was $3,000 I had but didn’t want to spend, taking care of that. Shortly after it got put back together, the universal joint in the prop shaft started getting very wobbly and I was informed that BMW didn’t sell a new u-joint but only the whole assembly. I should have let it go then rather than going ahead with the replacement and then spending a few hundred here and a few hundred there for the next couple of years. The day I sold it was one of the happier ones in my automotive life. I bought a Datsun 720 pickup and my neighbor tweaked the tailgate by dropping a 100-pound of concrete on the top lip. By the time I sold the pickup in 1990 the dented area was the only place on that thing that rusted.
The Peugeot soldiered on until it was rear-ended at a stoplight by some uninsured dumbass in a big Plymouth wagon. Watching the folded-up 504 towed away was probably the saddest day of my life. But that was a crash, so nevermind.
Sudden catastrophic timing belt failure while driving on the highway during rush hour in a major metropolitan area in a wheezy old $400 Volvo 740 wagon about two decades ago.
I’d only had the ~230K mile car for a couple of months at this point, having bought it as a “mechanic’s special” (ha!). It had indeed been a mechanic’s car but his daughter had used it for college the prior few years, and it was priced seemingly appropriately. She apparently missed her dad’s lectures on proper maintenance, though, as the poor timing belt was either 130K miles overdue, or 30K miles overdue, but even the mechanic dad didn’t proffer such information during the sale.
Got rid of it instead of doing an engine swap (and reasoned that it had still been cheaper to own than a rental car would have cost during the same period), and replaced it with another RWD Volvo wagon, but I increased my budget more than 10x to avoid repeating that event. Had that one for about 8 years before moving on to a replacement vehicle with more than one airbag.
-Honorable mention to the interior of my old Mazda that I had my first year of college, which had an engine failure while I was en route to my then-girlfriend’s house after having stopped at Subway for lunch for us. I neglected to grab her red wine vinaigrette chicken sandwich from the backseat before the tow truck took it to the shop (which declared it mechanically totalled), and the car sat in the Midwest summer sun for probably a couple of weeks before I was able to get to it to clean it out. The malodorous ambiance from the spoiled sandwich, along with the biggest damn fly I’ve yet seen that had taken up residence inside, both coupled with the Midwest summer heat were enough to convince me to nearly immediately abandon taking most of the art projects that were inside with me (which I regret as they were probably not contaminated) along with other personal effects, tools, and supplies I’d later miss. Poor college student self made a decision in haste and paid for it later. I did take the badge off the grille and made it into a keychain which I still have, though.
When my Peugeot 504 got totaled and towed, I wish I had taken the cheerful, delightful horns and my CA Press Photographer plates before it went to the big crusher in the sky.
When I was a kid in the 90s, we had the same blue Plymouth Voyager as approximately half of American households. It had developed an issue where the floor would occasionally get damp – we believed it was HVAC-related, but never properly diagnosed it because it really didn’t bother anything otherwise. One summer, we stored the van in my grandma’s house after swapping it out for my dad’s classic car that he stored there in the winter. That spring/summer in Wisconsin was especially rainy, with lots flooding in the area. A couple months went by, and while at the house for a visit, I went to the garage to retrieve something that had been left in the van. I opened the door and reached for the drawer under the passenger seat, and felt something chalky on it…I looked around the interior, and discovered that every single surface – the carpets, the seats, the seatbelts, the dash, everything – was covered in a multi-colored array of mold. While the damp area on the floor was one of the worst spots, the epicenter was an area on the 3rd row seat where my brother had spilled a milkshake probably two years prior. It was a horrifying scene.
We took the van to a place to see what it would take to clean it up. As it turned out, the guy we had look at it had recently been treated for severe mold toxicity. The van ended up being totaled.
Does it count as a crash if no one was in the car? My car rolled down my driveway backwards, went across the street, and came to a sudden stop thanks to my neighbors tree.
My college roommate had a similar experience….it rolled across apartment parking lot, clipped a neighbor’s fender, rolled down small embankment, stopping in middle of 4 lane road. Police came a knocking.
My sister and her husband bought old cars and occasionally flipped them. They bought on old pickup and took it home, she went to back it off the trailer (they lived near the top of a mountain) and discovered it had no brakes as it went off the edge of the driveway and fell through the trees. She dived for the floorboard and was fortunately only bruised up.
Neglected to seat one valve lifter in my ’80 Vanagon properly, so when I started it up, the lifter launched though the side of that head. Had to remove the head, to find someone skilled enough to weld it back together.
My brother’s 1980’s Honda Accord had just blown a gasket. He had a time-sensitive gig to get to in Arizona, and he was near our hometown around Buffalo. He was gonna have to borrow my car.
A storm was coming. My car was parked under an old tree with limbs prone to gravity in higher winds. I went to sleep. I awoke. I moved the car before any damage. I went to sleep. I awoke. After breakfast, I headed out for a walk. There were no limbs down under the old tree. Another younger tree lay horizontally across the middle of my car, between its two axles, its front wheels not touching the ground and its rear trying to reach the front. Ugh.
Half shaft got out from the CVJ on the motorway in Germany. It’s a pretty loud sound. Luckily, nothing bad happened apart from being towed for 200 miles in the middle of the night. And my cousin broke a one gallon container with red wine in his car. Smelled rather bad for a rather long time.
I had a buddy in high school whose dad drove a mid nineties Taurus wagon. His dad is changing the oil one day and realizes that he had not yet purchased new oil. So he left the car in the driveway with all of the oil drained out of it figuring he’ll pick up oil on the way home from work the next day and finish the job. In the meantime my buddy’s brother wants go go somewhere, so he grabs the keys to the Taurus and fires her up. Oil light comes on immediately, but he finds it relatively easy to ignore. He did not make it very far before the engine was toast.
Teenage driver.
First he didn’t have his own vehicle and drove my Camry when he needed to. I got so many dings and scratches and creases all over that thing. Every day it seemed like something new showed up. He once described how an ATM just jumped out and smacked the car in the nose and put the big divot in the hood and bumper.
Then an old Ranger that we’d just gone through and gave a refresh for him to drive was wrecked the same week he got his license. Pulled through a near lane of traffic to make a left and got smacked by the second lane of traffic he couldn’t see.
He then drove my Smart and ran it out of oil too many times. I think it’s shedding chunks of valve and the thing is pumping oil down the trashed guides faster than I can pour it in. Needs a new top end.
I guess technically that second thing is a crash, maybe the first thing could be considered a series of crashes, but I consider it all as just a characteristic of the worst thing to happen to my vehicles – the general dumbassery of a teenage driver.
Squirrel Chew on the idiotic Daimler wire coatings. Apparently the eco wire coating smells like Nuts when warm, unfortunately not Deez nuts right here. Little tree rats are relentless too, at least until I found a way to safely wipe a Da Bomb Hot Sauce on them. You just have to be cognizant of it when working on the car going forward. accidentally taking a whiz with DaBomb on your fingers is no Bueno.
One managed to chew the crossover fuel line on a 392 and when it blew high pressure fuel all over that was pretty bad. managed to get it off and not catch on fire, but I really thought it would go up in smoke.
Mother’s Day 2005, a freak rainstorm hit Houston while we were taking my MIL out for dinner. Took the missus’ car, and I parked my 1995 Geo Prizm LSi in the street. Next morning, I went to work. Opened the driver’s side door and stepped into 4″ of water. Turns out the drain in front of my house was clogged while we were at dinner, and the water rose about 12″ into the car. Drowned the main computer. Ended up limping to my mechanic, who replaced it with a used unit, but six months later it went south. One of the most reliable cars I’ve ever owned, but it apparently couldn’t swim.
Rust. Floor rotted out if my 1985 300ZX. And my 1987 Acura Integra.
I thought those days were behind me when I bought my 09 Mazda 6. Then one day, the steering started pulling to the right. I figured it was a stuck caliper, as did the local trusted shop. I dropped it off to be fixed and got a call an hour or so later. “Yeah, your subframe’s mostly gone!” I saw pics. It was.
Thank heavens there was an impending recall. I got a brand new subframe and a rental car at Mazda’s expense. So not all bad.
Not one but two cars back in the mid 80s.
We went to get my girlfriend’s Civic four door in Boston after she had left it there overnight. It had been torched and was a total loss. Drove up to the North Shore in my Scirocco to borrow my sister’s RX-7 so that she could use it. I was living in the Brighton section of Boston. I parked my Scirocco on Comm Ave, as I often did and the RX-7 in a garage that I occasionally used.
Came out the next morning only to find that my Scirocco had been stolen…
Driving family to in-laws for Christmas on Saturday. Had a tire inner sidewall fail and have to use the spare. Switch to back roads to keep speed down. Narrow two lane has a washout pothole that pops the second tire.
Rest of family gets rescued by Pop-pop the next morning but I stay in motel two nights to wait for tire shop to open. Didn’t miss Christmas morning but sure did miss all the money I spent for hotel, tires, and a new wheel as well.
I tried to start a 1985 Chevy Cavalier when it was -40 out. It cranked, but wouldn’t start, so I tried stepping on the gas. It started… and the gas pedal froze to the floor. Revved to the moon before I was able to shut it off. I freed the throttle linkage, started it again, and it started ticking. Then knocking. By the time I got to work, it sounded like a small man with a very big hammer was under the hood. Yep; it spun a rod bearing.
It was a $300 car, so I wasn’t heartbroken, but it had brand-new tires on it. So I went and found another $300 Cavalier that had some front-end body damage, swapped over the front clip and the new tires, and thought myself clever. A week later, that one broke a valve spring and dropped a valve. I gave up and had both cars towed to the junkyard, new tires and all.
In their defense, however, both cars still started, ran, and moved under their own power.
-F temps, especially when it gets to double digits negative can be brutal for people and cars alike. Where were you living at the time that it was -40 F? Canada or Alaska?
I’m in MN and for 12 years a tdi (diesel) jetta was my daily. When temps got below zero F, I would cycle the glow plugs 2 or 3 times before even attempting to start it.
the coldest near me in the winter is maybe the low -20s and even that I dont think Ive seen in +10 years, usually -teens something is the lowest temps.
I had a ’90 Olds 88 with the 3800 engine as a company car. It was sitting in an uninsulated garage on a -20F morning in Cleveland. The power went out and I had to wade through thigh-deep snowdrifts to crawl through the rear window of the garage and pull the release ropes on the two electric garage door openers. The 3800 just shrugged it off. Not the most exciting to drive, but it was really good for what it was. In private life, I had a 2001 Jetta TDI and I cycled the glow-plugs at least 2x anytime it got below freezing. It started much more easily after the second shot of heat.
Mice. I bought a Chrysler Crossfire from a friend’s estate. It had been stored in his sister’s barn in the woods one winter. The mice got in it. It wasn’t just that they chewed some wires. It stunk. I tried to get the smell out. I could NOT get the smell out. Interior out, vacuums, inspection scopes, fresh air, coffee grounds, scent bombs, ozone machines, arm and hammer, etc., etc. The smell was just permeated into the car. The car was ruined for something I couldnt see. And it drove just fine. I will never buy a car that has the slightest hint that it had a mouse infestation again.
My family had a slightly related own goal. We parked a car in my grandparents corncrib over the summer because we had too many cars (evidently this is a thing). To avoid the mouse infestation you dealt with we put mothballs under the hood and in the cabin under the seats. Returned to get it in the fall and the mothballs had evaporated away as they are intended to do and there was no evidence of rodent activity of any sort. However, the car smelled of mothballs in all weather for well over a year and in any warm weather or when parked in the sun for 5+ years.
My two boys have a knack for ruining our vehicles inside by spilling liquids that smell horrible. My older son was bringing raw milk home from a school cheese making project in 6th grade. It spilled down under the rear seat and into the cargo area of our manual 2006 CRV. That smelled horrible all summer. Recently, my younger son borrowed my wife’s manual 2022 Civic Si to pick up a Corvette rear differential. It leaked gear oil into the trunk on the way home and I learned that gear oil is way worse smelling then motor oil. Both vehicles are nearly totaled with the intensity of the terrible smell. I may rent an ozone generator to try and get the gear oil funk out.
Gear oil is indeed a horrible smell. You’ll want to get a steam extractor to remove the contamination, if possible. Or just replace the soiled fabric.