Early on Saturday, July 25, I was doing the hustle, looking for 1 or 2 more rides to finish off my day. It had been a good shift; busy, surge pricing, reasonable customers. I picked up an unaccompanied female in Trenton for about a 10 minute ride, with the app lining up another immediately after she got in the car. Both of them are surge price, short and helping me to get to the ride bonus. It's all OK. I'm a little tired but alert and fine; it's just another Friday night, honestly.
We come up Route 129 in Trenton, a 4-lane highway that cuts through the center of the city, with an island in the middle. I'm going to make a right turn on Lalor Street, then another left, and get my current passenger to her drop point in a minute or so. But first, I have to wait for the light to turn green. I'm second in line for this.
My car, a 2010 Honda Insight, has 309K miles on it. It's 10 years old. I am its only owner. It has a dent in the middle of the back bumper, some cosmetic damage on the driver side rear-view mirror, a dent in the passenger door, some paint chipping, and liners in the back seat that tend to slide out from time to time. It's never had a significant mechanical issue. It's survived a low speed collision that was my fault, a rear-ending in Trenton that gave it the back bumper issue, and it's been back and forth to California multiple times. In terms of pure miles, it's been to the Moon.
The passenger in the car is the 15,731st ride share ride it has served. The car has made me $163,826 in 6,533 hours of time in apps.
I look into my rear view window at a sudden flash of light, and hear a screech of brakes about a tenth of a second before the impact.
My passenger is suddenly in the front seat. My glasses fly off my head. Her possessions scatter all through the cabin. We are hit with such force that the car is shoved hard into the car in front of us, despite my foot remaining on the brake the whole time. The front of the car folds inward, and a few seconds after everything has stopped, the airbag feebly deploys. With part of the front cabin now exposed to the running engine, the cabin heats up. The heat focuses me more than the pain in my shoulder, where the seat belt locked me into place.
I turn the car off and check on my passenger. She says she's OK. My leg is wet and I'm worried that I'm bleeding, but it turns out just to be from my passenger's beverage. I try to open my door, but it doesn't open. I open the passenger side door for my passenger, collect some of her things, and follow her out.
Neither the driver that hit me, nor the folks that we got shoved into, are seriously hurt, but we're all sore and kind of dazed at what happened. Soon afterward, police are on the scene. I talk briefly with the other victim and the perpetrator. He gives the former his insurance information, but not me, and I figure whatever, there's police here. He seems kind of out of it. I never lose consciousness or awareness,
I take a few photos of my trashed car, and I know immediately that it's a total loss. The back is caved in, there's broken lights, and that's not even talking about the front, which is an accordion. I text my family that I'm OK, then follow up with pictures. The next 40 minutes are spent finding my passenger's things, talking to police, waiting for my wife to come pick me up (the house is 15 minutes away), and not finding my glasses. A tow truck shows up and gets all of the cars off the highway. We go home.
The next day, I wake up and I'm sore all over, but otherwise OK. The day after, I go to my local Costco to replace the glasses, and get told that I may have a detached retina. The day after that, I check in with a retina specialist, who tells me that's not the case, but a pre-existing condition that I need to keep an eye on. A few days after that, I get the paperwork dealt with from the police and get all of my personal effects out of the old car, and my wife finds my glasses.
A few days after that, after a few checks around the area, I find that the dealer that I bought my car from has... a nearly exact replica of it. Same color, same model, just four years newer and with nearly a quarter of a million less miles on it. It's also in perfect cosmetic condition. I take the hint from the Rideshare Gods and take delivery of it. We've now been in the saddle together for a month, 137 app hours, $4,224 in billing and 353 rides. I've got another 3 years of payments on it at a good rate.
The driver that struck us, according to the police report, was eating chicken wings -- so, um, I have no idea what to make of that information, other than to wonder where he got the wings from, because damn, must have been good wings. He also was driving without insurance (of course) which winds up being a benefit, in that it causes Uber's carrier, Allstate, to activate and reimburse for damages. I'm still collecting on that, and it won't be a ton, but better than getting rear-ended on a Saturday morning in Trenton.
The biggest takeaway I have from the experience -- beyond some nerves about waiting at traffic lights in Trenton, because it's not like I can avoid the area when doing ride share -- is that it could have been so much worse, really. I don't seem to have suffered any long term damage. The new Insight has performed fine, and actually has been producing significantly better miles per gallon so far. My ratings are on the uptick, because it's a nicer car (newer, leather seats, a little bigger, undamaged), and I probably drive a little slower and safer for wanting to delay its first bruise.
The Insight was the first completely new car that I've bought in my life, and quite clearly one of the best purchases I've ever made in my life. Good car. I hope its child does nearly as well.
And that it doesn't spend its last moments in my presence getting destroyed for no reason at all...
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The car died nobly, saving your life. It has earned its reward in Carhalla.
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