The Great Crash
Yesterday, while heading back from my client The Borg, I ran into some bad traffic on the notorious SR-520 that connects Seattle with its eastern suburbs. Or perhaps I should say, some bad traffic ran into me. A car on the freeway lost control, smashed into the median strip, bounced across two lanes of traffic, and slammed into me at about 50mph as I was on the exit ramp. I took a full impact collision on the drivers’ side and was smashed up against the guardrail of the exit on the right. It was one of those things where I could see it coming but couldn’t do a damn thing to avoid it.
Luckily, thanks to the miracle of German auto engineering, I walked away without any visible injuries, and the other driver was OK too. Unfortunately, my shiny new war chariot is a heap of twisted metal. I had it towed to a body shop, but I’d say the odds are it’s totaled. There was a pool of greenish liquid under the front left tire. Nothing good comes from that.
A state trooper was on the scene instantly and it was clear the other driver was at fault. She wasn’t drunk or reckless: she had been trying to merge onto the freeway, accelerated too fast, got behind a slower vehicle, and started to spin out when she hit the brakes too quickly. Her car fishtailed, hit the six-foot concrete median partition at full speed, bounced off and across the highway to hit me. She was extremely fortunate to have not been killed four or five different ways.
There’s a full police report, witnesses, etc. It shouldn’t be a problem to press the claim. I have contacted my insurance company and started the wheels turning. Later this week, I’ll see a doctor to make sure I don’t have whiplash or anything. I count myself very lucky. This was a BAD accident, and if I’d been in my old Toyota sardine can, I’d be in the hospital or worse. The car that hit me was a big Ford station wagon. It’s not the kind of car that usually comes out of these things second-best.
Due to the unfortunate economics of new cars and leases, my six-month old vehicle is probably in that black hole where its current book value is less than the total of the remaining lease payments plus the residual. There’s a clause in my lease that will make up the difference, but if the car is totaled, it seems like I come away empty-handed and have to start from scratch. I can’t imagine there will be anything else forthcoming in terms of a settlement. The driver who hit me was a 23-year-old teaching student from Eastern Europe. It was lucky she had insurance at all, I think.
All of which is better than being grievously injured. Whatever the costs, the moral here is that if you’re going to have a high-speed accident on the freeway, it’s better to be driving a vehicle hewn from a two-ton block of cast iron by paranoid German perfectionists. On the Autobahn, this would have been a fender-bender. There’s even a chance the car may be recoverable, though the people at the body-shop thought it would take five weeks easy to fix if it was even possible (it’s a bad sign when they take their hats off and play taps when the tow-truck pulls into the lot). I’m driving a rental for the foreseeable future, I guess. In any case, you can be sure the next car will be another little Panzer tank.
7:48:38 AM 
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