Lucky or Unlucky?

One of the down sides of our new resident is the parking situation. There are plenty of parking space along the street since every home has at least a 2-car garage plus drive way. However, since the street is an upward incline, people tend to speed up, much higher than the marked speed limit of 25.

We found Tom’s car involved in an accident. It was parked out front so we can access the garage easily; we just came back from an errand run and saw the policeman directing traffic in front of our home. We knew it wasn’t anything good. As you can see from pictures below, someone ran into the RAV4. An out of state young driver “claimed” he was trying to catch a sheet of paper about to fly out of his window. And he missed the parked car on the curvy road and ran into it.

The right side of his car hit the left rear end of the RAV4. His car airbag came on. The passenger door couldn’t close. And as for the RAV4, well, it was pretty damage. So there is no way you can hit a car under the speed limit and cause the damage as seen here. Anyway, we didn’t know if he got a ticket for it or not. At least he didn’t run away. Both cars were not operate able anyway.

Lucky:

• The young driver didn’t run away, because we only had liability on the RAV4. Gosh, it was a 1998 with like 180K+ miles on it.

• It wasn’t our fault as we were not even in the car. The car was legally parked.

• The condition of the car was on its last leg.

• Both cars were insured by same insurance company (State Farm).

Unlucky:

• The car was deemed totaled. Repair cost would have been much more than its value.

• The insurance company gave us a market value higher than we thought we would receive for the car. Yet at the same time, we wouldn’t have a “weekender” car for Tom anymore when he needs to transport dirty or junky stuff, like on his fishing trip.

Overall, I think we somewhat luck out this time. Even though it caused lots of inconvenience on our time (due to the back and forth with the insurance company and body shop), we at least didn’t suffer financially. It would have been a different story if the accident was with the beamer.