the accidental car purchase

 

The accidental car purchase

We all buy replacement vehicles for a variety of reasons.

In 2017, I spent $1000 to replace the front motor mounts on our 12-year-old Altima, but the car still shuddered when it was idling. I then took it in to the local Nissan dealer, who told me it needed a new transmission, which would cost $4000. Since the car was only worth about $2000 at that point, I traded it in for a new Hyundai Sonata, which I am still driving today.

The purchase of the Altima, though, is a lot more interesting.

On June 8, 2008 (a Sunday) our daughter and my favorite wife took her old LeSabre to one of the suburbs west of Evanston to pick up Foxie, the latest feline addition to Kelly’s household. On the way back to Evanston, Sharon attempted to stop for a red light, but quickly discovered that she had no brakes.

Fortunately, the car was moving slowly when she tapped the car in front of her, so no damage was done. By chance, she happened to be right in front of a gas station, so Kelly went in to buy some brake fluid. When she added it to the brake reservoir, she noticed that the fluid simply shot out of the back end of the car, due to the fact that the brake lines had rotted away.

Since she was close to the dealer where I worked, she nursed it there to get repaired. At the time, Sharon worked as a nanny in Winnetka, and she was able to take the train to work for the first 4 days of the coming week.

However, she needed to run some errands on Friday, so she asked me if she could borrow a car from the dealership. The Nissan manager was pretty loose about lending vehicles, so he quickly agreed. On Thursday night, I drove home in a shiny black 2005 Nissan Altima 3.5 SE.

The next day was Friday the 13^th.

About noon that day, I got a call on my phone. When I answered, Sharon burst into tears. I said, “what’s wrong?”. She said, “I hit a truck”.

Oops.

On the way home from work, it started to rain. Since the wiper controls on the Altima were much different from the controls on the 1998 Buick she was driving, she looked down to see where the controls were, so she did not notice that a large box truck had stopped right in front of her.

WHAM!

By the time she finally got to the dealership to return the car, she had decided that she liked the car, so she asked me if she could buy it. Nannys in the northern Chicago suburbs make good money, so we discovered that she was able to buy the car. The $1000 in damages to the front end was added to the car loan, and her loan was approved.

 

She kept the car for almost 9 years, and put another 90,000 miles on it, before I traded it in. If you want to know how a chunk of ice from a semi-truck wrecked he front bumper and windshield washer reservoir, that’s a story for her to tell.

The point of all this is that every cloud has a silver lining. The seemingly catastrophic accident that started this story led to the purchase of a vehicle that served us for a lot of years.