Last night, my daughter comes in from work and tells me she thinks she ran over a rock on her way home in her '01 VW Beetle (her choice, not mine). I told her I'd check it out this morning. When I open my front door, I see a huge puddle of oil underneath the front of her car. Upon further inspection, I also see a one foot wide trail of oil all the way down the street and around the corner (looks like something out of a NASCAR race.) I crawl up under the car and find a hole that looks like a 50 caliber bullet hole in the oil pan with enough rock chips around it to make it look like an archeological dig. So, I get in my truck and follow the "oil trail" down around the block to approximately 1 1/2 blocks away. I find the boulder she hit and I still cannot figure out how something so big was able to get under this car!!! We were very lucky it happened so close to the house. Otherwise, it would have meant the whole engine rather than just the oil pan.
The pan is pretty low on the new Beetles. I have replaced at least three at work so far. Usually it's the bolts in the front crossmember that make the hole.
I was driving to work in the dark on interstate once. A truck full of tree limbs, 2x4's and other crap flies by me. About 10 minutes later, I see some tree limbs, 2x4's and plywood in the road. I slow down and navigate around around junk, and checking it out in the mirror, only to look up and see a white box right in the middle of my lane. I hope it's a cardboard box, but when I hit it, and my malibu jumps almost a foot in the air, I realise it's a rock. It grabbed a crossover pipe, and pushed it into my oil filter, bent a lower control arm, a trans crossmember, put a 4" deep 2ft long dent in the floor, and put a 2" deep pucker in the gas tank. I limped home (no leaking oil), got my parents van to goto to work. When I was driving through the same area, it was all cleaned up. I was hunting for that fucker in the truck, we were gonna have a little discussion... never found them. Anyhow, it's really too easy to run over stuff it seems...
I was driving a country road thru upstate New York one summer day in my 68 Biscayne sedan. There was a river crossing with an old, two lane iron trestle bridge with an uneven surface. I started over and a flatbed truck with a load of stuff started over from the other side. We were approaching each other and something fell off the truck and started sliding toward me, it was an extension ladder. The ladder was right in my lane sliding straight at me, I couldn't turn left or I'd hit the truck, couldn't go right or I'd go over the bridge. I puckered up, lined up and drove right over the ladder; all threee of us, car, truck and ladder passed at about the same time and speed. It never scraped or touched the car. I watched in the mirror as the ladder bumped the curb and teetered off the bridge.
What scares me is that people rarely slow down when they come up on shit in the road, which really screws you up and catches you unaware. ps-Born in SA; not known for the good roads from what I know : (
I bit of info for you guys. If you make an insurance claim for something like this make sure the item you hit was 'airborn' when you report it. Airborn projectiles are not considered within your control but if the item is on the ground then obviously your dumbass should have dodged it (insurance companies policy not mine). Just a heads up so you can get maximum return on your insurance asspounding policy.
When my daughter was 19, she called me one day to say that her Scout II just stopped and she couldn't get it started. It had about 3k on a rebuilt 345 paid for by me as part of the fresh resto. When I arrived on the scene, the motor was locked solid . I asked her when was the last time she checked the oil. She said she just put two quarts in last week but didn't know if that was enough because she didn't recheck it. She was living away from home at that point away from daddy's garage. She never paid me back for rebuild number two the following month....
i was driving to work one morning in my dad's little flatbed toyota while building my impala and had not other transportation and came upon a rock in the road about the size of a softball. vehicle in front of me passed over it, so i only saw it for a tiny bit of time. i thought i was over enough to straddle it, but i cot the edge of it and bounced it up into the truck. it clipped a shock which then started squirting oil all over the exhaust pipe. i saw the smoke trail and was shitting bricks big time. kind of a fluke occurence, but a fairly lucky outcome. as far as reporting hitting stuff in the road goes, never say that an animal was standing in the road, for the same reason as above. it should always be WALKING or RUNNING across the road. if it is standing still, you shoulda missed it. i always figured debris in the road would be treated similarly, if it just fell off or bouced off of another vehicle and was moving, etc.
Back in my teenage days me and my brother were driving around this abandonded neighborhood development one night which was just a maze of paved roads in the middle of the woods and lots of poeple threw their garbage and shit out there.and this big cardboard box i spotted ahead was just too cool not to smash,so i tell bro to gun his 84 Crapmaro berlinetta with a oh so bitchin 305 and we proceed to hit a ....goddamn abandoned dishwasher After we shit ourselves we inspected the damage which consisted of a nice crushed front end,hood,fender.we limped the car home trading barbs of its yer fault not mine.
That's true. I was talking with the rep on the phone when I was making my claim for the time I hit a deer. She said that if an object touches the ground before it comes in contact w/ your vehicle, thay file it under comprehensive. If it meets your car before it touches the ground, then it's filed under collision. When the adjuster came to look at my car, he confirmed this. So for yall that are running liability-only, keep that in mind. (No, I DO NOT sell insurance.)
"my car had a puddle of oil under it then I came out of the store." -wife "What did you do?" - hubby "I drove home. By the time I got home it had stopped leaking." -wife
That is funny as hell. Just reminds me of the typical teen age stuff that happens. I had a buddy that decided to run over mail boxes one night after we had been doing some drinking. I was not with him. I went home in my truck. Monday at school he did not say anything but a cop comes and drags him out of class. Seems he ran out of gas while sitting on top of about the 12th mailbox he ran over and left his truck there and went home. He spent the next week or so fixing the mailboxes.
I work at a VW dealership, yeah we get alot of those. Beetles, Jettas, and Golfs mostly. Go to www.deiselgeek.com they have a metal underpan for those thats tough, expensive, but tough. Also you can get a oilpan sheild thats metal from the dealership, also expensive, but so are our oilpans!!!! Good luck with this.
LMFAO!!!!!!! Cant count how many times I've heard that. And then they're mad at me for giving them a total to repair. $6000 for a motor!!!!! and thats not installed yet!!!!!! I like my cousins comment when she blew up her Geo Prism: Her: "My oil light came on and it stopped running." Me: "How come you didn't shut it off when the light came on?" Her: "Well I didn't drive it very far!!!!!!!" Fuckin' bitchin.
Sometimes ya get lucky - about 30 years ago, I was riding home from college in my buddies huge '70's Chrysler, we were just a few miles from where we were going, and he hits something that blows out the front tire. We pull over, and sure enough, there's a hole you could stick your thumb in - with hex shaped edges! While my buddy is hopping around, being pissed and cursing the automotive gods, I walk back up the road and find an odd looking chunk of metal with a bolt sticking out of it. Looks sort of familiar, like part of a bell housing. I walk back past our car and my still pissed bud, and go take a look under this old dump truck sittin' a little ways down the road. Sure enough, blown apart clutch & pressure plate, shattered bell housing, and the guy's name and phone number on the door! Anyhow, I was able to get my buddy covered for the damage. And sometimes, ya don't get lucky, My neighbor Lloyd had experienced my wild assed driving in my '83 GTI several times (it had better lateral acceleration ratings than some Porshe models at the time) and tried to emulate me when he came up on a roll of fencing on a dark highway while driving his Taurus wagon. Poor bastard just could not beleive that he had rolled his wagon by flicking it in a tight right - left swerve @ 65mph. Only had liability on the car, too.
Sometimes you get lucky....a few years back I bought a '50 Chevy pickup at a swap meet bout an hour from my house. Guy I got it from was nice enuf to haul it to my house as it was non-running and already on a trailer. We're cruisin down the interstate for a short leg of the trip in the right-hand lane. Some idiot in front of us has a bed mattress tied onto the roof of his car with one piece of string or twine....the front of the mattress is floppin' up and down in the wind...since he's drivin' pretty slow, we're gainin' on him. All at once the string breaks, the mattress flies straight up in the air about 20 feet and lands behind us on the interstate in the middle of both lanes! I watched in the rear-veiw as far as I could and everyone dodged the dam thing. Couldn't believe it....just goes to show , you gotta stay alert out there.
The Jalopy Journal
