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October 04, 2004
Car Talk
A year ago today, I purchased the 2002 Mazda Protege pictured above. And suddenly, my long automobile nightmare was over. Well, I guess three weeks isn't really that long...but it certainly seemed like an eternity at the time. It all started with "The Accident". On a mid-September morning, I had been driving up W. Poplar Street, heading towards downtown Carrboro....and just as I was approaching the intersection of W. Poplar and Davie Road, a minivan on Davie plowed right through a not-very-visible stop sign without stopping. I had absolutely no time to do anything but run right into the minivan. My car got spun around 180 degrees (torque!) and wound up looking like this:
Side note: Just a couple of weeks ago, I actually saw another very serious-looking accident at this same Davie/Poplar intersection...and on "Car Free Day", no less. To me it looked like the exact same thing had happened: a car running through the Davie stop sign. I normally don't like extraneous stoplights but I'm starting to think that they really ought to do something to fix that intersection. Anyway, back to Fall 2003...
The minivan that I unwillingly hit came out of the accident with a big dent in the side but in fairly drivable condition. My car, however, was totalled. On the plus side: everyone was OK and the other driver admitted to being at fault. On the minus side: the book value of my 1990 Prizm was not very high and so the insurance payout wasn't all that much. Plus, they totally stiffed me on a rental car. I had thought that I would be given a rental car for a reasonable amount of time, long enough to weigh all of my car-purchasing options. But they only paid for 5 measly days. So over the next few weeks I wound up with three different rental cars....actually, four if you count the big panel van that I rented for a bachelor party. I'm usually not a very car-dependent person...I bike around town and to campus all the time. But I hate not having transportation options and flexibility. Plus, the time when you really need a car the most is when you have to go car-shopping!
After all the crap with the insurance company settled and I got over my initial bout of car-buying paralysis, I went over to Raleigh and bought a year-old Protege from Hertz Car Sales (highly recommended and much less odious than regular car dealers, Carmax, etc.). As I said, I'm not a very auto-centric person but it's been a really fun car to drive this past year and I like it infinitely better than the old (but admittedly reliable) Prizm that I'd been driving around for so long. At the rate I'm going, the Protege will probably last a long time as well. The limited powertrain warranty expired today and the terms were "12 month/12,000 miles"....so I checked my mileage and got a kick out of the fact that I'd only driven 5,089 miles in 12 months. Taking the "car" back out of Carrboro, ha. Maybe I need to take more roadtrips...
Posted by Tim at October 4, 2004 11:59 AM
Comments
When I lived in the Bay Area, it was about the same for me, with regards to mileage. Even though I took a two week driving tour of the state for my honeymoon, we still didn't manage to go over about 400 miles a month.
Posted by: robin at October 5, 2004 07:44 AM
I drive my car to work every day up here, and still have less than 10K on it after a full year. It would be even less if I hadn't driven it to NC twice.
Posted by: bo at October 6, 2004 10:43 AM