Last week, a family member of mine who shall go unnamed scraped my car on the TREE OF DOOOOM in our driveway. It is an understandable mistake, but curious given she is used to driving a much wider car and managed to stray too far right at a pinch point caused by an intrusive overgrown pecan tree.
This tree has claimed many many victims, especially in the days before backup cameras. If you are unfamiliar with the house, you could easily follow the line of the pavement in your mirror while backing. The driveway gets oddly wider after this point, further confusing the situation.
But this was pulling into the drive, not out.
Anyways, she rubbed up against the protruding root and dented the rocker and door as well as deeply gouging the paint down to the primer.
Naturally, I got three quotes from different sizes of repair shops. The large one was very expensive. $1,800 for this one area.
The medium sized repair shop quoted me $1,200. Less, but still a lot considering she hasn’t had a job very long.
The just-the-right-size smallish indie shop that isn’t a fly-by-night operation quotes me $930. They have been in business nearly 40 years but run a pretty lean operation, so I trust them. And their employees were friendly.
So here’s the rub; do I get a younger sibling to cough up the first $900 of her paychecks (she really makes bank though for what she does) for repairing relatively unnoticeable collision damage? Yes.
But here’s where it gets complicated. I didn’t want to reveal this quite yet, but my faithful Chevy Cruze is not going to be mine any longer by the end of the year. My parents are going to buy it off me this winter when the funds are available for a very generous sum as a graduation present and give it to her.
Edit: I pretty much feel like a jerk for even bringing this up. I should just let bygones be bygones for such minor cosmetic flaws in a car that is about to be hers.